Mother Kate’s Meditations

Unclean

2012-01-31T09:36:00.000-05:00

I was young, 29 years old, when I became Rector of my first church. There I encountered my first raging alcoholic. He was my Senior Warden and his story is one which he openly shares. It is the story of a war with an unclean spirit known as alcoholism.

Sometimes, particularly in the life of a small parish, the Rector has to call the Senior Warden at night. When I called Dewey, his voice would sound funny. It was slurred. I worried that perhaps he had a stroke. It took me about six months to realize that his slurred words, his red face, his falls were all caused by drinking.

When I realized the truth, I took Dewey and his wife to a rehab hospital. Dewey was still convinced that he did not have a problem. All of his physical ailments he justified in many ways. His wife met him every evening at the door of their house with a glass of Scotch.

Dewey came to the treatment facility to humor me. His wife was beginning to realize that he would die. But she still hoped that she might be wrong. She still balked from telling him the truth because she was afraid that he might leave her.

They ushered us into a small room for triage, where we sat waiting.

The first person to enter our room was a pretty young woman. She seemed innocent and loving. She started with gentle, innocuous questions such as his age and weight. She took notes on a clipboard. After a few simple questions, she eased Dewey on with a gentle tone asking things like, "And how much scotch do you drink each day?" When he reported the enormous amount, she did not act shocked at all. She continued with a light tone, as if she thought all of this completely normal. Dewey got more and more confident, more and more relaxed, and his true alcoholism came out. He began to be more open. You could hear how he justified his drinking, how he felt the he worked hard and that he deserved it. By the time the young woman left, she had completely exposed Dewey's alcoholism in all it's ugliness. You could hear it loud and clear, justified and smug. Dewey was relaxed. He was convinced that he did not have a problem. I began to feel afraid and wondered if I had brought them to the right place.

Then the doctor came in. A short man with glasses, he did not look like the warrior that he was. He came in with the clipboard that the young woman had completed. He pulled a chair up close to Dewey and his wife. And he spoke.

"I am a doctor. I am here to tell you that you are killing yourself, that you are poisoning your body with alcohol. Do you know that, if you continue to drink as you are doing, you will be dead in three years?" Then he looked at Dewey's wife. "Do you want your husband dead? Yes? Then keep on doing what you are doing. Dewey, all your physical ailments are caused by the drinking...you are poisoning your body."

It has taken me years to articulate what happened in that room. I had to learn how to name it in a new language. Because what was going on was not just medical. It was spiritual. And there must be a language, a spiritual language to describe it, but the language of the Bible has become so lost to us that it took me at least a year to find the right words.

In that little triage room, we were in the midst of a spiritual battle. What we were dealing with was an unclean spirit. But because of modern medicine, we no longer choose to use these words. They sound medieval, even superstitious. I want to be clear with you. This was an unclean spirit, a demon.

Almost everything we need to know about unclean spirits is given to us in this passage from the gospel of Mark.

Jesus enters the city of Capernaum, and when the Sabbath comes, he goes to the synagogue. It is his refuge, the place of worship. He is drawn there. Just like he did when he went to Jerusalem at just eleven years old, Jesus goes to worship God.

As soon as Jesus arrives in the synagogue, there is a conflict, an incident. A man is not behaving normally. We don't know how this man behaved, how the spirit manifested itself. Mark does not take any time at all to describe the nature of this spirit or how it manifests itself. He is simply not interested in spending any time at all diagnosing this man. Does he babble? Does he hurt himself or others? We don't know. All that is important is that this spirit is unclean.

Americans are embarrassed by these exorcisms in the gospels. Often we just ignore them. But unclean spirit in the ancient Greek means impure disposition, troubled mind, broken thoughts. All of us experience unclean spirits in the sense that we all battle wayward thoughts in the privacy of our own minds. Think of anxiety, depression, anorexia, addiction, self-hatred, rage...

It is important to note that Jesus encounters this spirit in church, not outside on the street, but in the very house of worship itself. You would think that everyone would be on their best behavior in church, right? But anyone who has been in church for awhile knows that sometimes our worst selves come out in church, our most infantile or insecure selves. There is something about the presence of Jesus that makes our dark sides emerge.

Most unclean thoughts do not want to be seen, articulated. They hide. And that is one way to identify a thought or feeling. Are you embarrassed to say it? Do you know, somewhere deep inside, that it is wrong? If you are hesitant to share a thought or inclination, that is an indication that your motivation is unclean.

The first sign of health is honesty. The first movement of God is to bring the dysfunction out in the open. And that is often the most misunderstood part of church. We all think that everyone should behave in church, that everyone should be kind and sweet, and so they should be. But somehow being in the presence of God can make the worst in us come out. In fact, all our unclean spirits will be exposed here in church. God does not protect us from them; God exposes them. The first thing that happens when Jesus walks into worship is that the unclean spirit is exposed.

Mark describes the spirit as unclean. Not evil, not horrible, just unclean. These are the thoughts in your head that are not of pure intent. The thoughts that might want to hide from Jesus. They don't have to be terrible, just muddied a bit.

Unclean motivations operate out of fear. They are protective and defensive. If you are not open to feedback or the opinions of others, look at why. Unclean motivations are afraid of change and they are afraid of God. The unclean spirit is immediately defensive when Jesus arrives. "What have you to do with us, Jesus?" it asks.

When unclean thoughts are at risk, when they are at risk of being exposed as unclean, they make a lot of noise. Depression, anger, conflict - these can be the results when an unclean spirit is challenged. And it does not mean that someone has done something wrong. Conflict is of Christ and can be a good thing. It is a myth that we should be surrounded by harmony in the church. Actually, when unclean spirits are involved (and they are all over us in this world), bringing Jesus in the room means more conflict and not less.

In the gospel, Jesus allows the unclean spirit to speak, to make itself known, and then he tells it to be quiet. He does not converse with it or answer its questions. He just tells it to be quiet.

Silence, he says.

Unclean spirits hate silence. They want you busy and noisy. For heavens sake, don't stop and really listen to what God might be doing in your life. The enemy of impure thoughts and motivations is silence.

And then Jesus makes the unclean spirit come out of the man, but on it's way out it tears at it's former host, clings to him. Removing the unclean motivation is surgical. It hurts. It can be violent and painful and it can wound you on it's way out.

I felt that I saw a bit of Christ in that doctor that day. But even with his truth and wisdom, Dewey still would not stop drinking. He refused to check himself into the hospital that day. In fact, after the doctor told Dewey the truth, he was furious. He stood and walked right out. And things got worse before they got better.

Exactly one year later, Dewey could not walk. He was seated in his chair at home drinking when the family and I decided to do an intervention. He said that he didn't care if he died, but when I told him that I was worried about the state of his soul, he got up. He went to rehab and he is still alive and sober today.

And almost every day, he goes to AA meetings where he tells the truth about his unclean spirit. He says, "Hello. My name is Dewey and I am an alcoholic."

If it hadn't been for his faith in Jesus, Dewey might never have gotten out of that chair. He is alive today because he believed.

When he became sober, we did a wedding in church. Dewey and his wife wanted to be married again, without alcohol. I will never forget that beautiful day.

What are the unclean spirits that you keep to yourself? What motivations drive you away from God? What about yourself are you uncomfortable telling others? Bring these thoughts and fears to Jesus, into his silence and let him help you become clean.

"I will make you fish for people."

2012-01-24T14:04:00.000-05:00

My grandfather was the quietest, most gentle man. He used to make us lie on the floor and he would say "Stiff as a board! Stiff as a board!" and he would place his gentle old hands behind our little shoulders and lift us up to a standing position, tilting us like a board. At first we would giggle and squirm, and he might make it worse by tickling us. But sooner or later, we would learn how to be stiff as a board and he would move us forward and up. He was so kind, so gentle.

My grandfather was a fisherman in his old age. He retired to Sanibel Island mainly so that he could fish. He parked his small boat in a little cove and every morning, early, he would putter out to sea and fish.

One day, my little brother Jonathan decided to go with Granpa on a fishing expedition. Jonathan was about 5. I did not ask to go; it simply did not occur to me. But Jonathan made a formal request to fish and I remember how Granpa's eyes shined with pure pleasure.

They got in the boat early that morning. We expected that they would not come back until lunch. But by 9, we heard the puttering motor of the boat entering the small cove in which Gandpa's house sat. And we heard another sound: the sobs of a little boy.

My mother and I rushed outside. Jonathan was weeping but he did not seem hurt. He just kept pointing to the fish, lying dead in the pail. "It couldn't breathe!" he gasped.

Grandpa got out of the boat. He was clearly quite disappointed and a little angry. But in his simple, gentle way, he said, "I don't think I've got a fisherman here."

Jonathan became a vegetarian from that day forward. That lasted about five years. He also refused to speak to Granpa for the rest of the vacation, which I found to be a terrible shame. Evidently, fishing was much more violent than Jonathan had thought.

Jesus said to his disciples, "Come to me, and I will make you fish for people."

There is no denying that fishing is a violent act. The fish is swimming along, content in an environment called water, an environment which the fish could never identify nor articulate. And all of a sudden it is yanked into another realm. In this new realm, it has to die and give it's body for the nourishment of others. It flails around helplessly, it's mouth and gills pumping, hoping to find water again, but it finds emptiness, air. It is completely lost, out of its element. Until it is caught, a fish does not even know that it is a creature of water. It knows very little of its own existence, that's for sure.

What did Jesus mean when he said that the disciples would FISH for PEOPLE if they followed him? Did he really mean what he said, that they would be yanking people out of their comfortable lives into another level of existence, one in which they could not control their own destiny and they had to give their lives up? Is that really what he meant?

A lot of us like to think that we spread the gospel in order to make people happy, to help them lead content lives. We tell people about Jesus so that they can feel better, get their lives in order, right? That is such an appealing thought. Sometimes I yearn to promise people that their lives will be easier if they become Christian and practice the faith. But I would not be telling the truth.

In reality, we are introducing them to the One who will turn their lives upside down, the One who will ask them to give up everything, even their own lives, out of love and devotion to Him. We are yanking them out of their comfortable lives into a realm in which they have little control, in which God alone has the last word.

A friend of mine has six children, and she agreed to house and temporarily adopt a little girl from Afghanistan. This little girl had a severe heart condition and, through the efforts of a local charity, money had been raised to fly her here to Jacksonville to have surgery. The little Afghan girl could not walk more than ten steps without getting out of breath.

The surgery was much more complex than the doctors had foreseen. The little girls family had to be contacted in Afghanistan. They had to hospitalize her for three months. And when she was released, they kept her here in Jacksonville for another three months, just to monitor her. My friend kept in close contact with her mother in Afghanistan.

As the little girl grew in strength, the host family took her to Disneyworld, where she was able to run and play for the first time in her life. My friend took pictures and sent them to Afghanistan. It was a miracle to see her play!

Finally, the little girl was ready to be sent home. They filled her suitcases with new clothes and gifts for her family, marveling at the good work that God had done through the doctors. They had saved her life.

A few weeks after her arrival in Afghanistan, the American mother got a phone call. The little girl had died.

They don't know what happened, if it was the altitude that originally made her sick upon her return, but her parents got anxious and put her in the hospital in Afghanistan. They have no idea what happened in the hospital but someone made a mistake, something went terribly wrong. And her precious life was over.

Back in the United States, my friend was devastated. How had this happened? How could God have made this girl better only to take her life back at home?

The Afghan mother called again. "I am calling to say thank you," she said. "My daughter may not have lived long, but, because of you, she ran and played. Because of you, she really lived."

I wish that I could tell you that fishing for people would make everybody happier, but sometimes living a life of sacrifice and learning to love God is like entering another Universe, where so much more is expected of you and you have so little control. You flail around, doing the best you can, offering your life for something much larger than yourself. You wake up to the fact that there is so much more to life than you can ever comprehend and sometimes the best outcome is the one that you least expected.

We do not follow Jesus to be happy. We follow Jesus to be saved. We follow Jesus because there is so much more to life than just being comfortable. We follow Jesus because we get to taste eternity in Him and there is joy there, much better than happiness, there is joy.

On Martin Luther King Day, I walked the bookstore at Barnes and Noble and picked up a new biography of Dr. King. Dr. Martin Luther King's close friends spoke of his loneliness and even depression, especially toward the end of his life. He longed for someone who he could sit down with and share his loneliness, his pain. He was not always happy, but he was saved. Man, was he ever saved.

After the disciples were caught by the great Fisherman, they would go on to spread the gospel far and wide. Many of the greatest disciples would be killed for their beliefs, but I bet, if you asked them, they would remember the day that Jesus walked by, the day that they were caught by Him, and they would give thanks for the gift of serving Him. They would say that it was the best thing that ever happened to them, ever. Because the gospel is about so much more than being happy. It is about being caught by Jesus, belonging to him, and what that means for our souls. It is about a life far beyond our existence here. It is about joy. It is about something greater than this life. It is about God.

Worthy

2012-01-10T12:47:00.000-05:00

Many years ago, one of my favorite movies was released. It was called Ordinary People. In the movie, there are two brothers, Buck and Conrad Jarrett. Buck is the older and the favorite of his mother. Conrad is quieter, and lives in the shadow of his brother.

One summer, the boys decide to go sailing. There is a terrible storm. The waves surge and the boat capsizes. Conrad manages to hold onto the capsized boat, but Buck drowns.

When Conrad returns, he is changed. He does not want to live. He feels that he doesn't deserve to be alive. He is depressed, despondent. After three months in the hospital, he goes back to high school. But all the things that he loved, he no longer cares about. Nothing means anything anymore. In a last ditch attempt to find help, he agrees to see a therapist.

The therapist is a Jewish man who works out of a small, dark office. He rarely speaks but mostly just listens to Conrad. For months, Conrad talks about how bad he is, how he doesn't care about anything. He is not interested in choir or sports or friends, nothing. He is lost. He believes that he is bad and deserves to die.

Late one evening, Conrad has a panic attack. In tears, shaking, he phones the therapist. "I need to see you now!" he cries. The therapist is smart enough to know that Conrad is at a pivotal moment. He puts his coat on over his pajamas and meets Conrad at his office. Conrad paces the office and finally gets to talking about the events of the accident itself. He describes how the boat capsized and how he held on. "I should have let go and looked for Buck, but I didn't! I didn't!" In response, the therapist says something very simple: "Conrad, you are a good person....have you ever thought that you might have been stronger?"

With those words, Conrad begins to believe in himself again. Slowly, his life returns.

Stories of Jesus began to fly about after his resurrection, and it became so important for the people who saw Him, who knew him, to write their stories down. Mark was the first one to respond to that need.

The Gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four gospels. It is also considered to be the first gospel, the gospel that was written down the earliest.

Mark wrote his gospel with speed and precision. He only told the parts that he thought were most important. There is no story of Jesus' birth in the Gospel of Mark. No, Mark, the shortest of the gospels, gets right to the point. Mark does not consider how or where Jesus was born to be of importance. The first thing that Mark wanted to tell us was about Jesus' baptism, not his birth. For Mark, Jesus became Jesus at his baptism. It was baptism that began Jesus' life as the Son of God. The years before Jesus' baptism were just preparation for his ministry. Those years were important but they were preparatory. Jesus becomes fully himself, fully awake and aware, when he is baptized. Jesus was named by God at his baptism. And the words that God speaks aloud at Jesus' baptism are vital words; they are the words of life. Mark records only God's words, not Jesus' or John's, but only God's words.

We translate God's words into English in the following way: "You are My Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased." I have never really liked the translation "well pleased." It reminds me of my grandmother, who would tell us that she was "pleased" with our grades over dinner. So I went back to the ancient language of the New Testament. And I discovered something wonderful. The words that God spoke really mean not so much "With you I am well pleased'" but instead what God said was more like:

"I call you good."

"I name you good."

When God created the world, God said that it was good. God saw the light, separated it from the darkness, and identified its goodness. All the parts of God's creation were good. Part of the act of the creation was the declaration that each part was good. It was created and it was good.

But when we fell from God, we separated ourselves from that One who calls us good. And we no longer knew who we were.

This happens all the time in our world. Children are abandoned and no longer consider themselves good. Parents divorce and the child wonders why, was it because she was bad? A parent hands over a child to be adopted and the child wonders if he was just not good enough. He wonders for a lifetime.

We have been hosting leadership breakfasts on the plight of the child in Jacksonville. The roots of so much of the crime in this country stem back to parents who abandon their children, hit their children or neglect them so badly that the child begins to believe he is bad, that he is capable of violence, that there is no compassion left in him. And it is a short walk from there to hatred and fear. It is as if the parents are telling the child, in ways deeper than words, that they are not good, that no one wants them. And once a child thinks he or she is not good, their life is hard to retrieve.

I know a woman who counsels men who have abused women. Her great gift that is from God is this - she is able to search for the goodness that lies deep inside the man. She is able to see beneath all the pain and violence and hurt to something more, some hint of goodness. And in her eyes, they can begin to see themselves as good. Healing occurs when they believe that they are good.

What happens in baptism is so simple, so primal, and so vital. God declares what was once true before the fall of mankind. God says that in Jesus, we are given names, we are claimed by God and we are good.

Today we baptize Hunter, Owen and Kristen. Today God declares them good. And all of you, every single one of you, is now called to see their goodness. Witness to it, call them to it. As they live their lives, as they make their choices, remind them of who they already are, who God calls them to be. Good.

Remember who you are. Any voices that tell you you are not good are not of God. God created you good and names you good in your baptism. Never forget that.

The Name of Jesus

2012-01-05T14:18:00.000-05:00

Seventeen years ago, I came to this Cathedral to work as an Intern. I was in Seminary and my husband, JD had a clerkship with Judge Tjoflat. I was blessed to be here, to preach my first sermon, teach my first bible study, learn to listen and sing with the choir. It was a wonderful year for me. Now that I am your Dean, I look back on that year as God’s way of introducing me to you.

It is hard to begin work in a parish. The first and most important thing to do is to learn the names of people. It is vital to learn names. When I mispronounce the name of someone, I hurt their feelings, and even make them feel unwanted. I will never forget when I was ordained a deacon and my bishop called me Karen. I wondered if I had actually been ordained.

Back when I first came to this Cathedral, I was watching TV at our beach bungalow in Atlantic Beach when a television pastor came on. I will never forget his sermon. He was preaching to a huge crowd. At least 1000 people seemed to be gathered. He had the crowd all reved up. And this is what he said,

I am a Gator Fan! With these words, half the crowd cheered and half booed.

But if the Gators loose three in a row, I just might become a Seminole Fan! Have the crowded went wild, half booed.

Because I like a winner!

My Jesus, he’s a winner. My Jesus, he’s an All-American!

I remember vividly turning to JD. “Strange,” I said. “I thought he was a Jew from Palestine.”

My Jesus. Why did he think that Jesus belonged to him? I was almost envious of the way that he claimed Jesus, as if they were best friends.

Most of us Episcopalians don’t speak a lot about Jesus. We feel that his name is too sacred just to throw around. We want to hold it close to our hearts. Sometimes I wonder if we are also worried that we might offend people of other religions. Should I or shouldn’t I, say the name? Will it offend people? It might. Better off just to say God. One Baptist minister says, Honoring all faiths, I pray in the name of Jesus, but that seems awfully wordy to me. Why not just say God? But we rarely pray to Jesus. Most of the time, we say Lord.

Why is it that we are shy about using his Name?

I read a story about a college girl who was attacked while walking to her dorm one night. She attended a beautiful college on a wooded campus. She was walking on a well-lit path, with her backpack over her shoulder, when a man grabbed her from behind and dragged her into the woods.

The girl did something strange. Instead of screaming or fighting, she began to speak. She told him her name.

My name is Sarah, she said. What’s your name?

He tore off her backpack and pushed her to the ground.

My name is Sarah. What’s your name?

My name is Sarah, she repeated as he stood over her, ready to hurt her.

And then he stopped. He just stood there, staring at her on the ground.

He left her lying on the ground. He did not hurt her. There was something powerful about knowing her name. She made him see her as a person, not an object. And he stopped his violence.

Many of us know that there are children all over the world who are starving to death. We know the facts, and we know the numbers. But we do not know their names, so we’re able to say, That’s too bad. And then we move on. But when an agency writes us with the name of one child, say one tiny girl who needs food, it is much harder to say no, much harder to stay detached. For in knowing her name, she becomes real to us; she becomes, in some way, related to us. And we cannot watch her die. We must act. Why do so many relief agencies ask you to adopt a child? Because then you will see a person, hear a name and you will be generous.

Eight days after their child was born, Mary and Joseph took him to be circumcised according to Jewish custom. It was at this time that the child was given a name. Jesus. Babies died so often either in childbirth or in the first few days afterwards that they were not fully human until the naming ceremony. When they were given a name, they became a person. And their life began.

To this day, we take naming seriously. I remember pouring over books before naming our first born. I was aware of how his name would affect his character, perhaps his personality. It seemed such a monumental decision. Would we name him after anyone? Would he have a name from the Bible? We understand how the name of a person can impact their life.

When we baptize a child, I will ask the parents, Name this child. And with the name, the child is baptized. Names are spoken in marriage, in burial, they represent the essence, the individuality of a person. To love someone is to speak their name. Somehow the personality of the beloved is reflected, captured in the sound of the name.

This child was given the name Jesus. It means The One who Saves.

God had given us a name once before, on Mt Sinai. But the name had been so full of mystery that no Jew even dared to pronounce it. Many Jews even today call God Adonai, which means Lord, rather than speak the name of Yahweh. And to this day, because ancient Hebrew had no vowels, we do not even know how God’s name was pronounced. We can only guess.

But when the baby came to us, God gave us a human name. A name to speak with familiarity and with love, a name that we could pronounce easily and remember well. God gave us the name of his Son, Jesus.

From the first centuries, Christians viewed this name as holy. Inherent in the name itself was a bit of the presence of the one who bore it. We were supposed to pray in his name, in the name of Jesus. That was the way that all Christians were and still are called to pray.

For hundreds of years, Christians wrote his name in symbols. IHS. Jesous Hominum Salvatio. Jesus savior of mankind. Jesus, the one who saves the world.

So why is it that we are shy to speak of him when his name is a gift to us? Why do we feel that we are somehow not being respectful if we talk to him as we would a friend? Didn’t he want that? Doesn’t he still want that?

When Mary was weeping at the tomb of Jesus, he appeared to her, but she could not recognize him through all her grief. And then he spoke her name, Mary. With the words of her name, she awoke and she recognized him.

Do you want Jesus to speak your name one day, to wake you up to his presence? If you want this, then don’t be afraid to speak his name. Speak it every day, quietly and loudly, in prayer and in song. Use the sounds that God has given you to speak of his Son. The sounds are gifts to you, bridges to the presence of the Almighty. His name is your gift.

It’s hard to believe that you are on a first-name basis with God. But you are.

God said, Please, call me Jesus.

The Baby is God

2012-01-05T14:14:00.000-05:00

It is possible that the baby Jesus may have been premature. Mary had to walk or ride a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, a distance of many miles. She was young. This was her first child. It would be very possible that she delivered that baby early.

She would not have eaten much on the journey to Bethlehem. There were no prenatal vitamins or supplements. I’m sure Joseph would have bought whatever he could, carried whatever he could. But the rations could not have been great. So Jesus was probably not a big baby, not fat with cuddly legs, but probably thin and small.

Mary and Joseph had no one but each other to help in the birth. Neither of them knew what they were doing. They must have been so scared.

I traveled to Bethlehem years ago. There are small rolling hills and strong winds. Shepherds to this day dig caves in which they shelter their animals. There are no wooden stables like the ones we like to depict in manger scenes because the wind is too strong. No simple wooden structure would stay up. No, Jesus was most likely born in a cave dug in the side of one of the small hills, to keep the animals out of the wind. That was why there would be a manger, a feeding trough for the animals. And it was here that Mary laid the child, and wrapped him in bands of cloth, or rags.

This tiny baby was born in the harsh weather without a house or a doctor. Born to young parents who did not know what to do. And this fragile little baby was God. How strange for the All Powerful Maker of the Universe to come to us in this form. We make the scene into a fairy tale, but the reality is that the Christ child was born physically at risk in one of the most violent countries in the world. Why did God chose to be born this way?

When I was in college, I traveled to Russia to work in orphanages. One day, I visited a baby orphanage. The Russian woman who took me told me that it was a sign of trust that I was even taken to the baby orphanage. Not many Americans are allowed to see inside, she said.

I have never forgotten what happened that day.

I went into a room filled with babies. But it was so quiet. Being only in college and not understanding why, I asked the woman why the babies were so quiet. They would moan quietly and rock themselves. The woman explained that they stopped crying when they realized that no one was going to come, so they learned to comfort themselves.

But there was one little baby girl who was crying hard. Her face was all blotchy and red. I was drawn to her crib, rushed over in fact to see what was wrong. I picked her up.

Her face cleared up quickly. She looked at me with these beautiful eyes and gave me a watery smile.

You are the mother, the woman said. Take her.

But I was in college and the organization that I worked for did not allow us to try to adopt. I asked the woman to tell me about this little girl.

She was found in a garbage dumpster two days ago. The woman said. She still thinks that someone might come if she cries.

I left that day and did not go back. No one would take me back. But I still remember the little baby girl and her watery blue eyes and the way she smiled at me.

When my boys were born and they cried at night, I would bolt out of bed with this urgency. What was wrong? What could I do? How could I help?

The cry of an infant is a sign that they need you, that they want to be held, or they just want you to look at them and be with them. It is a sign of the need to be loved.

I want you to think of God in a different way this Christmas. I want you to think of God as The Baby.

I want you to realize that God cries out to YOU.

Many of us pray because we think it will help us, or we want God to help others. We think that God will bring us more peace or understanding. But it is always because of our needs that we pray. We never stop to think that God might want us.

But God chose to become a child tonight. God chose to be born as the most dependent, small, helpless creature on the planet. God chose to need us just as a baby needs its mother, just as a child needs to be held. God chose you and God cries out to you.

When you pray, go to God as you would go to hold a crying baby. Rush to God, without thinking or analyzing or wondering how much time you have: just run to God. God calls out to you. God has designed this creation in such a way that God is crying to you to come and be with him.

Remember the Garden of Eden? Remember how Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? And once they had eaten that fruit, they realized that they were naked and they hid from God. They separated themselves from God first; they did the leaving. And God wandered in the Garden, calling to them…Where are you?

God has been searching for you ever since. The baby cries out to you to come and hold him, come and be with him.

It is strange to think of us holding God. It is strange to think of God wanting to be with us. But God does long for us, yearn for us, cry out for us. The All Powerful One, the Maker of the Universe chose YOU. Not Mother Theresa or your faithful neighbor, but you. Just you. God wants you for exactly who you are.

That little girl in the baby orphanage did not care if I held her or just sat near her or sang or danced. She just wanted me. She just wanted to be with me.

I go up to the third floor chapel at the Cathedral to pray. From the window, I can hear the children of the homeless shelter next door, Community Connections. They are playing on the playground. Some are crying, some are laughing. And I hear the voice of God in their voices.

The baby Jesus wants You, and He cries out to you tonight. He cries to you in the poor who don’t know where they are going to live. He cries to you in the ill and those who are mourning someone who has died. Jesus calls out for you to come to Him, help Him, minister to Him and with Him. When you do anything to the least of these, you do it to me, Jesus said. I came among you as a little baby who needed you. And to this day, God calls out to you. Come back to me, God says. Come home.

Mary

2011-12-19T11:22:00.002-05:00

As a young girl, I played Mary over and over again in a small but simple opera that my mother wrote. We traveled from church to church performing this opera for congregations of all different denominations. The result of all this was that I really began to think about Mary and what must have been going on in her head. Here is my theory about that young girl and what she went through on that fateful day that changed the world forever, that day when the angel came to visit and announced the birth of a Savior who was to be her Son and God’s son.

When the angel came to Mary, the Scripture tells us that she went through a variety of emotions. The first word used to describe her feelings means to be startled or greatly agitated. Mary was upset by the angel, there is no way around that. This was not what she expected. It may not even have been what she wanted. The Scripture is very clear that she is UPSET by the angel telling her that God is with her. It is not so much the physical appearance of the angel that frightens her, it is what he is about to say. Mary seems to instinctively know that her life is going to change forever. And she is not sure what she wants.

Mary does not ask the angel who he is. It makes me wonder, had she seem him before? She does not seem frightened by his appearance (most people are blinded, frightened by angels). Rather she is troubled because she knows that something tremendous will be asked of her.

We always depict Mary as this placid Virgin, always calm and pretty. She is never disheveled, never nervous or unsure. Just passive and peaceful all the time. But that is not how it reads in the original greek of the New Testament. In fact, it is strange to me how almost all of the English translations play down her emotions, her responses. In the original language, Mary is not so passive.

I would like to suggest that our responses to God when God enters our lives, enters our hearts, are very similar to the responses of Mary. And, like Mary, when God comes to us, we don’t just feel one thing. We feel many emotions at once. But, most commonly, the first thing we feel is fear.

The second thing that Mary feels is confusion. When the angel explains that she is going to have a baby, she is confused. She cannot conceive of how this is possible, given that she is a virgin. This seems so far beyond anything that she can even contemplate. She is honest with her confusion and is not afraid to ask the angel how this will all work. I love her for that. She does not try to impress or pretend that she understands. She does not nod stupidly or turn glassy-eyed. She stops the angel and makes him explain.

“How can this work?” she asks. “How can this happen if I am a virgin?”

We often ask the same question of God. You mean that you want me to do what? How will that work? What do you mean?

The idea of having God’s child was definitely NOT in Mary’s life’s plan. She wanted to be a mother, yes, probably, since that was the highest goal of every woman in Jesus’ day. But I’m sure that she had never conceived of this.

When the angel explains that God will simply overshadow her, she accepts this without further explanation. And then she says that greatest words of all.

Here I am.

Throughout the Old Testament, these are the words of the most faithful people. Abraham spoke these words when God told him to leave his country and go to another land. Jacob spoke these words. Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul and even David spoke these words. The prophet Isaiah said these words to God, Here I am, Lord, send me.

The most faithful of God’s people in the Old Testament said these very words. They are the words of the soul who is ready to let God’s will be done. They are the words of all of us who realize that God’s plan may be better, larger, more comprehensive and more beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine. These are the words that we all strive to say to God. Here I am.

And so the soul moves from fear to confusion to eventual trust, just as Mary did.

This morning we will hold the Christmas pageant as the liturgy of the Word at both the 9 and 10:30 services. A young woman will play the part of Mary. Her name is Amelia and she is very special. Amelia was born with a rare condition. She has no cholesterol. She is home schooled by her devoted mother. She is loved by our youth group. Cases like hers are very rare in the world right now and she is doing beautifully. When I look at Amelia, I see another human being who does not really know what the future will hold but who nevertheless says, Here I am Lord, do with me as you will.

It is scary to think of God being in charge of your life, scary to think of what might happen if we were to let go of our ambitions and expectations and allow God to enter us and act through us. It makes me scared just to think of it. But Christ is born when we step out of the way and allow God to do something radical and new with our lives. This kind of discipleship is very rare for we must listen deeply in order to hear God’s will for our lives. And many of us don’t have the patience to listen.

There are just seven days to Christmas. Each day, let’s say these words to God

Here I am Lord, let me be with me according to your word.

Amen.

Advent

2011-12-03T12:50:00.002-05:00

I was nine years old when they first asked me to babysit. Nine. The couple who lived right down Willow Street had a toddler girl. She must have been close to two years old. I came over at 6 and her parents were so happy to go on a date. I fed her supper, we played. I put her to bed. And then I was alone in a strange house. I remember it vividly.

First I watched the Wizard of Oz, but when that was over, I had nothing to do. I sat on the sofa in the living room. Everything smelled funny. The grandfather clock made so much noise. The minutes seemed to last an eternity. I kept waiting for the sounds of their footsteps on the front porch. What if a robber came? Where was the telephone?

The sounds grew louder and I became more watchful. Ten o’clock came and went. It was well past my bedtime. What if they had been in an accident? What if they never came home? What was that sound? Why did the shadows look so large?

At 11, I called my dad. I asked him to come over and wait with me. He was a good dad. He got out of bed and walked down the street and sat with me. It was not so hard to wait with him. Nothing seemed scary when he was with me. Just the fact that I was not alone seemed to help so much.

They came home some time later. Now that I look back, it must have seemed strange to these young parents that their babysitter had her dad there. But what were they thinking? I was only nine!

Jesus is coming again but we don’t know when. We have no idea when, it could be hours, days, years, millennia. We just don’t know. But we know that he is coming and his arrival will be something else. In the gospel for today, the first Sunday of the Christian year, we hear about how he will come. It sounds scary to me, with him riding on clouds, swooping into our mundane world to turn everything upside down. The sun will darken like an eclipse. The moon will give off light and the stars will fall from the sky. There will be cosmic signs such that we have never seen before. Christ will come in the clouds and he will send his angels to come and gather us up. It sounds like an earthquake with shooting starts or some kind of nuclear event. The heavens will be shaken, Mark writes. The heavens will be shaken.

You would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss such an event. So why then does Jesus say, in just the next breath, that we are to stay awake? He says that we are like slaves in charge of a house that does not belong to us. Like house-sitters or baby-sitters, we are to sit up and watch for the coming of the Master. The only problem is that we have no idea when he will come.

Why do we need to stay awake? Doesn’t this kind of cosmic arrival mean that everybody will be shaken, that everybody will wake up and see the Second Coming? How could you possibly sleep through that king of event? Why does it matter if we sleep before hand?

And what is so wrong with going to sleep? Why is that a bad thing? If I had not been so young and so scared, I might have gone to sleep at my first baby-sitting job. Would that have been so bad? The parents would have come home to find me asleep but in one piece and still on call for their baby-girl. They would not have been mad. It does not mean that I was not there or did not care. Sleeping is just something that we humans need to do from time to time. Why does God need for us to be awake?

The state that Mark describes is watchfulness. I don’t think that it has to do with how many hours a night that you sleep. It is about awareness. It is about how you live, not how much you sleep. How you live your life, about whether or not you are fully alive. What Mark is talking about is a state of mindfulness. It is about being fully alive. Our relationship with God and the eventual state of our souls has something to do with our mindfulness. It has to do with how alive we really are.

There are many things in life that lull us to sleep. A routine schedule, the daily work grind. A relationship that is long-standing and so comfortable that we are inclined to take it for granted. Many marriages fail and when you ask them what happened, they just say, “Oh, we drifted apart.” It is as if they got so comfortable together that they stopped working on being married. They expected it to come easily and soon it didn’t come at all. Studies show that couples that fight, not physically, but argue and disagree, tend to stay together. Because they are awake and paying attention to their relationship.

When you think about it, we humans try to be as comfortable as we can. We design our lives to take the sting out. We structure things so as to remove spontaneity. Most of us prefer to eat at similar times, exercise at similar times. Babies are happier when they have a routine and grownups are the same. We just like things to remain the same.

My father has been doing the stair-master every morning for ten years. Even though doctors and trainers all tell him that he needs to use different muscles each day, that he needs to mix it up a bit, he does not want to. He likes the routine. So he has very in-shape calves and a nice beer belly. But he is comfortable with his routine. Change, mixing it up, now that is just scary.

We lock our schedules in so that it seems that our life is repeating itself, like a broken record. Then we are shocked when our child grows or we see signs of ourselves aging. We structure our lives to make it look like all was comfortable, but it is not. God just keeps mixing things up and waking us up, startling us out of our comfort zones.

Illness wakes us up. Joblessness wakes us up. Depression, suffering, death-they all serve to shake us up. People tend to come to church for the first time when something happens to shake things up in their lives. They realize that they are no longer comfortable and that they need God.

The enemy of God is not fear, it is comfort. The enemy of God is the lulling sense that you don’t need God and the way that we forget that we are fragile beings hurtling through space. The sleepiness that Jesus speaks of is not physical sleep but spiritual malaise. It is when you stop being fully alive.

There is one thing that lulls us to sleep more than anything else: our busyness.

When you are racing from here to there, consumed with the minutia of urgent daily business, where is your mind? It is focused on the minutia and not aware of the big picture. As I drove my two boys hither and yon in search of a certain kind of sneaker, I could think of nothing but the traffic, my bad mood, the fact that the car was getting dirtier by the minute, my boys were fighting and if I was going to get them to their guitar lesson on time. I was moving fast, racing at 50 miles an hour down the highway to be exact, but I was lulled into nothingness. And I guarantee that everything that consumed and worried me at that moment on a Saturday afternoon will mean nothing to me in just a few days. And in a year, I will remember none of it.

At this season, the world will tell you to get busier. Buy lots of stuff! Wake up at midnight and shop til you drop! Christmas is about buying things and racing around to parties. Do and do and do and you will successfully never think about what this all means or why we wait for Christ to come at all. If we stay busy, years of our lives will go by, getting the box of ornaments out and packing it back in year after year. Soon we will realize that we have lived for decades and we do not know God any better. And we will wonder where the time has gone.

What are the signs of your times? What are people hungry for? Are you spending your time worrying about mundane things or are you actively asking God to guide you? If you are not asking God for guidance, if you think that you know what you need and you spend most of your time asking God for things, then you are still asleep. Mindfulness, watchfulness is marked by listening to God and to your fellow human beings. That is what it means to be humble, to leave room for the other.

I think that one of the reasons why we run around so much like chickens with our heads cut off is that we are afraid of standing still. When we stand still and begin to listen, we realize that we are empty and that realization is so scary that it keeps us on the move. But God cannot fill you if you do not acknowledge your own emptiness. And once God begins to fill you, well, then you really wake up.

When I look back on the churches that I have served, there is much that I cannot remember. Days went by with business and I can’t remember so much. But I do remember one place in each church with vivid recollection. I remember the chapel, the place where I prayed. I remember every detail of that room, the way the furniture felt, the icon or cross, the sound outside, just like I remember the living room of that house where I babysat for the first time. I remember because I was awake .

Ironically, when we sit still for a moment, we are more fully alive. The more we rush, the more we go to sleep inside. Stop the car. Breathe. Don’t let the precious moment pass you by. Jesus was just asking us to be alive. Don’t let yourself die inside. Wake up! Wake up!

The King and the End of the World

2011-11-21T11:22:00.001-05:00

It was an incredibly busy day at the office.

Tom heard his cell phone ring when he was in a meeting at 3 p.m. but he let it ring. “She knows not to bother me at the office,” he thought. By four o’clock, he was swept up in a conflict that was about to ruin a delicate business deal. He heard the phone again but did not even check the number. The urgency of what he was doing meant that they could wait. After all, he was making a living for his family.

He had to follow the meeting up with some documentation, emailing colleagues, going over the events, sending out his last thoughts. He left the office at 6:30 p.m. and got on his cell phone in the car. He called his wife, noting that she had tried him five times throughout the day. No answer.

He pulled into the driveway about ten minutes before 7 p.m. The lights in the house were off. Her car was gone. No kids around.

There was a note on the kitchen table.

Tom, I cannot believe that you forgot your son’s birthday. You promised to take him and his friends to the basketball game tonight. I have gone ahead and taken them.

And then the last line stung…

I don’t even know who you are anymore…

Tom sat down. What was happening to his life? How had he ended up so alone?

In that moment, he saw his life from a new perspective. And he didn’t like what he saw. More than that, he didn’t believe that God liked it either.

My son Max was about four years old when he first began to ask me the question. I call it the question, because each of my three boys has asked it and I never know how to answer.

“Mommy, will the world get hurt? Will it be over? Will we all die?”

The possibilities are endless. I remember in college, doing research on the Nemesis affair, the scientific hypothesis that the dinosaurs extinction was the direct result of a meteor hitting the earth. The Nemesis meteor would have hit with such force that it would have caused a dust cloud to arise and cover the face of the planet, blocking out the suns rays for a length of time long enough to cause all floura and fauna to die, hence the death of the dinosaurs. Geologists have found a layer of meteoric dust at the time of the dinosaurs extinction. Could that be what happened?

Once I began to study that scientific possibility, there was no denying that such an event could happen again. There was no denying that we are vulnerable. As a planet, hurting through time and space, there is no telling what we might run into.

“Mommy, will the world end?”

The Biblical answer is a clear yes. The world was born and the world will end. Just like all human life, the life of the world as we know it has a limit. God did not intend for us to last forever. That is why the Bible begins with the creation and ends with the end of the world.

Today marks the last Sunday of the Christian year. Today Jesus tells us, in no uncertain terms, about the end of the world. Today, Jesus tells us about the kingship of Christ and what many call the last judgment. We call this Sunday Christ the King Sunday.

The Son of Man will be seated on a throne and he will separate people one from another.

Christ will make a decision. Some will come in and some will go out. And Christ will make the final call.

This passage of Scripture has led to incredible fear and the judgment of one Christian over another for centuries. The question of who will get in and who will be left to eternal damnation is a question that lurks underneath our lives, causing us to wonder and to feel anxiety.

There are two kinds of Christian thought today. One is a Universalist perspective, ie that all good folk will go to heaven, no matter what their particular actions, so long as they don’t do something terrible. No matter what their faith. God loves you is the message, all you have to do is accept that fact. Sometimes I call this the Good for You Theory.

The other, equally inadequate theory, is that God’s judgment can be identified in advance by others and that we can tell people who is in and who is out depending on their particular beliefs. Those who do not believe in the correct way will be damned. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that only they are going to “get in” to heaven.

So which is it? Who is in and who is out? Will we ever know? What about people of other religions? What about those who do so much good but don’t believe in God? How can we figure it all out? And if we cannot be sure, then how can we do the best we can to prepare ourselves for this judgment?

When it comes to determining who gets in to heaven, there is a clear answer to that conundrum in the very title of this Sunday: Christ is the King.

You are not the King and I am not the King. Christ is the King. This means ultimately that we can surmise all we want about who gets in and who doesn’t, but the reality is that it is not up to us. And more than that, we cannot understand all that the King will do. Let Christ be the King and stop concerning yourself with what is not your role, to judge the salvation of others. All that we are to concern ourselves with is the state of our own soul and the manner of our own living.

In the gospel for today, Jesus gives us a clear idea of what the King asks of us. He describes the Son of Man seated on the throne passing judgment. And when the King accepts or rejects a soul, he mentions how that person treated others, particularly the poor and vulnerable in this life. And then he says,

Whenever you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.

Here is one of the greatest clues to salvation. If you live for yourself alone, you will die alone. You cannot go to God if you cannot share in the selfless nature of God. If you rush around your entire life fulfilling your own dreams and pleasing yourself, you will find a note on the table one day. God will have gone on ahead with life and you will be forever trapped in the selfishness of your shallow existence.

Why is selfish living incompatible with salvation? Because everything is interconnected. Living for the self is cutting yourself off from life. God exists in the poor and the downtrodden, the hungry and the needy. God exists in the other. When we help those who cannot help us back, we are helping God.

That means that we don’t just help others because God asked us to, we help others because we will be saved if we do so, because it is the only way to be fully alive.

God is part of everything here. God is in the poor, amidst the handicapped, the homeless. It is not an option, to help others, it is an absolute necessity. Everything is interconnected. You are not separate from those around you. If you have more, if you have been blessed with resources, with skills, then you are to share them. It is not an option, something for you to commend yourself about, it is a necessary act. Not necessary for the poor, necessary for your soul’s well-being.

Your belief in God must be expressed through your service and radical generosity. There is no true belief in God without actions that reinforce that belief. If you say you love Jesus and believe in him but live without giving a dime away or helping anyone in need, then your words are empty. Faith and works are two sides of one coin. There is no faith without works. And for those who do good works, often there is some kind of faith hidden deep down inside them, even if it can’t be articulated.

I do not like the word Charity. It implies that you are doing something that you should be commended for, something way beyond the call of duty. It implies that giving to others is a fundamentally unreasonable act, one that is done by super people who are selfless in nature. Charity implies some kind of ultra kindness, an abnormality. But charity is life as it should be, where people care for each other. Charity happens when we realize that to help another is to love God. You determine your salvation by how selflessly you live. Those who give their lives away will be saved. Those who cling to life, love, belongings, money-they will be left behind.

Can you put your loved ones ahead of yourself and love them enough to give yourself to them? If you can, then what about the people that you don’t even know? What about the poor?
If you want to see the face of Jesus, look deep in the eyes of the poor and you will find him. And you will want to help him there, to do whatever you can to help him. Help him. Give generously of everything you have: money, time, talent.

Live for yourself alone and you will die by yourself alone. Live for others and you will live with God.

The Saints

2011-11-11T17:00:00.000-05:00

When I was in third grade, I had to take a test to see if I was gifted and talented. We were all told what the test was about. I remember it so well. I wanted desperately to be gifted and talented and the test was going to tell me I was. I sat at my desk with my super sharp pencil.

The directions said to draw a house. I thought to myself, “What would the examiners want my house to look like?” So I drew a house just like the pictures I had seen in books: a box, two windows a front door, a roof. I made my lines very straight and my corners sharp. That must be what they want me to do! I thought with a smile. And I handed in my paper.

The results came back. I was not invited into the gifted and talented group. My friend Jacob was invited. I asked him how he drew his house. “I went wild!” he said. “I drew three chimneys, a round roof, and I put candy canes on the front door.” Oh, no! I thought. They didn’t want me to make my house straight and clear and like everybody else’s. They wanted originality! I wanted so bad to take the test again, but it was over. And I was not gifted and talented.

I didn’t know that they were looking for creativity. I thought that they were looking for conformity. So every Tuesday afternoon, Jacob went to the gifted and talented program and I had to go home. Even though we had spent every afternoon of kindergarden making up candyland games, I had to go home and he got to stay. I still feel bad about it.

As the days grow darker and the light dims, the church remembers those who have died. And we particularly celebrate our saints.

Most of us think of sainthood as some kind of an elite Christian club. Only people like St. Francis get in, people who perform miracles, give everything they own away and start monasteries. Most of us think that we could never be good enough, holy enough, pray enough to get in. Like my third-grade self, we keep thinking about what God would want us to do, how God would want us to act, rather than who we really are. We try to guess the criteria for sainthood and then we often fail to meet the criteria that we have made. We draw simple houses when God is really asking us to be creative and think outside the box. One thing is for sure. No two saints are alike. In fact, maybe sainthood is not a club at all. Maybe it is something much different.

I think that we have all been accepted or rejected to so many groups that we cannot conceive of sainthood as anything other than an elite Christian club. So we go to extremes. On the one hand, we have the Roman Catholic Church, where the requirements for sainthood are so intricate and detailed that Mother Theresa is still not in. Or we have some of the more liberal Protestant denominations who simply don’t have saints or denominations that say that every Christian is a saint. But that is like having a gifted and talented program where every child gets in. Though nobody’s feelings are hurt, the meaning of having the club in the first place is lost. There is no group if everybody is in automatically. It is no longer special, it no longer means anything. If grouchy Mr. Nelson who told me to shush every Sunday as a child is as holy as Mary the mother of God, then what does that mean? What incentive do I have to strive for goodness?

Neither tough requirements nor universal acceptance into the club seems right to me. Sainthood must be something more.

The Anglican Church wisely does not nail down all the requirements for sainthood, but it does proclaim that there are requirements and there are standards. However, those standards and requirements are known to God alone. It is God who determines sainthood. We do not have all the criteria because we are not the judges. Sainthood is a gift from God and God alone. It is not the church’s reward for good behavior.

And this is very important…

All baptized Christians are invited to become one with the communion of saints. But not all baptized Christians will accept that invitation.

When we baptize Christians, they are marked as Christ’s own forever. God declares them invited to the great banquet. A place is reserved for them in heaven. They are given a key to the greatest gifted and talented program of all time. And their lives will be spent answering that invitation.

A baby who is baptized will grow to about age five or so, and somewhere along the way, they will realize that a friend stole their toy or some other disturbing thing happened. The child will run up against the fallen, broken nature of our world. And, as their innocence begins to fade, that child will hear two voices: one voice of anger, resentment and frustration will tell them never to be friends with that person again, that this has ruined a friendship. The other, sometimes quieter voice, will be the invitation that occurred at their baptism. God will be quietly saying, “Come to me. You are mine. Behave as you are, made in my image. Forgive and live as I lived.”

For their entire lives, they will be given the choice between the voices of this world and the voice of the Risen One, who calls them to be holy.

I had the honor of doing an All Saints Service at Harbor House. Harbor House is a community of developmentally disabled people right off the Arlington Expressway. They live in Christian community. They believe that God particularly loves and blesses the poor, especially those who are handicapped.

I had had a very busy day. I had been to so many meetings that I felt drained. My stomach hurt and all I wanted to do was lie down and have someone bring me soup. I had that over exhausted feeling that causes you to feel like an overgrown child. My husband drove the boys and me to Harbor House, and I slept in the car, but it didn’t help.

I put on my robes and went to the common room to wait for the service to begin, going over the points of my sermon in my head, when a man walked up to me. He had Down Syndrome. He was just five feet tall, his face was wrinkled and red. He was probably about fifty or sixty years old. Old age for a person with Down Syndrome.

He came right up to me and held out his arms. He didn’t speak but just gestured. He was telling me to come into his arms. I walked up to him without really thinking and he held me and kissed me on the cheek. Then he took my face in his hands and looked at me. He looked deep into my soul with his bright blue eyes. And he smiled. I felt his love pour over me. We just stood there with him looking into my soul and me looking into his. He gave me something that I cannot articulate that night, a sense of peace, of understanding. He loved me for no reason at all.

I later found out that his name was Robert and that he cannot speak. But he sure spoke to me.

Sainthood is not a club. There is another word that Scripture uses. It is called a COMMUNION. It is the Communion of saints. It is not about Christian perfection. It is about Christian connection. When Robert looked into my eyes that Thursday night, I knew that I was looking into the eyes of a saint. I knew this because he loved me. And his face will be there in heaven, as a part of God’s kingdom. Now that I have seen his face, I cannot imagine heaven without it. For a brief moment, his face was part of Jesus’ face.

Before he died, my father-in-law gave me a picture of Jesus. It hangs in my office. From a distance, it just looks like any other beautiful painting. But if you move closer, you can see that Jesus’ face is made up of many faces: some are faces that we would know: Martin Luther King and St. Francis, Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa. Then there are unknown faces: little children and old woman, a housewife and a Chinese man. Together, this multitude makes up his face.

The communion of saints is not about criteria at all. It is about connection. If you want to be a saint, don’t try to be someone you are not. Be yourself, but connect. Love one another fiercely and not just with words. Act out your love and your commitment to God and to the human race, in your own unique way. If you strive to do this, I trust that you will see the faces of those who you truly love, those who have made you who you are. You will see the faces of those whose love has shaped and formed you. The house of heaven is made up of their faces and it is completely unique to you. Their faces make up the face of Christ.

Who will be there waiting for you in heaven? Who has consistently called for you to be a better person, to be true to yourself? Who has loved you wholly and unconditionally? Those people are your communion of saints. They emanate God’s love to you.

Do not spend your life trying to be someone who you are not. When you draw the house of your life, use bold colors and new ideas. Do not try to conform to some kind of a standard that you believe God has for you. Instead, try to connect with those you love. Try to call others to greater, more fulfilled lives. And most of all, try to love God as fully and as deeply as you can. God wants you to be yourself. God already has sainthood in mind for you. Your invitation was made at your baptism. It is an invitation which stands true for all eternity. All that you have to do is live into the invitation. All you have to do is say yes with every part of your being.

And now, before we baptize these children, we will prepare for an ancient liturgical custom. It is called the Necrology. Please get out the paper that can be found on the inside of your bulletin. Pencils can be found in your pews. I want you to write down the names of those people who you love who have died. Try to write legibly. These are the names of your saints. At the peace, there will be a basket passed around. Please put their names in the basket. As we distribute communion, we will read their names aloud. Thus, we are surrounded by the communion of saints as we share in the love of God, the body and blood of Christ.

Speak their names out loud, not just today but all the days of your life. Let their names be heard for all eternity. These are your saints.

The Saints and Self-Esteem

2011-10-31T11:00:00.001-04:00

This sermon was preached at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Florida.

I was new in 10th grade. My father sent me to a private school, much like this one, but not so cool. It was not a Christian school, just a secular, private school. I had grown up in the inner-city and I did not know how to fit in. I had no idea what to wear and since no one wore uniforms, dressing each day was an ordeal. I would try on one thing after another and nothing looked right.

But worse than dressing was talking. I was incredibly shy. Incredibly. I was so shy I that could not recognize the sound of my own voice. It sounded weird to me when I spoke at school. I guess that was because I hardly spoke.

At home, I was a completely different person. I fought like crazy with my little brother. I argued and talked to my mother about everything. And I constantly worried about my dad. He suffered from depression and would just stop working and go to bed. One time he went to bed for three months. We did not know what to do or how he could hold his job at the law firm. I was always worried but, at home, at least I could speak.

I loved theater. When I got to play a part on stage, it was like I was being given permission to speak. I could become someone else, someone who was not always scared about her dad. I could become carefree and happy. So I tried out for everything. And the spring of my sophomore year, they gave me the romantic lead in the Spring Musical.

It was Anything Goes. Set in the 20’s on a boat, I got to fall in love with a handsome guy and sing about it. We even kissed on stage. I was curious to meet the guy who would play the other lead. When I met him, I was not disappointed. His name was Mark Volpe.

Mark was handsome. He was a senior. He had a lot of friends. He was amazing. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I lived for rehearsals. He would talk and laugh with me. I would forget about my dad and just think about Mark. It was amazing.

The performance was everything that I could have dreamed of. And to top it all off, Mark gave me a letter and asked me to the prom. I went home elated. But when I got home, I got scared.

“I don’t think that your dad can handle you going to the prom with a senior,” my mom said. “It would just kill him with worry.”

So I wrote back. I’m so sorry, but I have to say No, I said. Mark did not wait long to ask out another girl, a senior. He seemed fine with it, but I was heartbroken. Later that year, I wrote him again, explaining that I had always really liked him but was too scared to go to the prom. He wrote back and told me that I reminded him of a clown.

It’s been over 20 years and I can still feel the pain. I have daydreams of going back to high school now, when I am confident and clear about who I am, when I am not afraid. I would go back and not worry so much. I would go back and not be afraid. I would go back and say yes to the prom and enjoy myself. But I cannot go back.

So I say this to you.

I know that many of you live your lives as two different people. You are one person at school, with your friends, and you are someone else at home, someone entirely different. Please raise your hand if you feel that this is true for you.

And we have this image of ourselves, or of the person we want to be. We think about how we look, who likes us or doesn’t like us, how we can fit in or stand out. We think about ourselves almost all the time. And the more we think about ourselves, the more we cannot quite fit in.

Every person, deep down inside, feels that they don’t belong. Even when things are going great and we have friends and we are dating our dream person, we still wonder, deep down inside, when all of this is going to end and we will be discovered for who we are, someone alone and left out.

The only thing that really brings us out of our self-absorption is falling in love. When I was really into Mark, when I couldn’t wait for the next rehearsal, I was happy because, for the first time, I was thinking about someone else more than I was thinking about myself. I got over myself for while and it was good.

But falling in love with people leads to disappointment. You go on a date and they say something really stupid and you just want to get out of there. Or they decide that they like someone else more and you live with that hurt. Or you chicken out and live with your own disappointment in yourself.

There is only one person who really can respond and love you back in the way that you need. God. Falling in love with God is what its all about. It is the best kind of romance. The only one that doesn’t leave you out in the cold or disappointed in some way.

The saints fell in love with God. They acted totally bizarre. They listened to Jesus’ words about how they should be humble and not show off, so they did things like this…

St Francis wanted to give everything to God, so he went to the bishop and, in front of the whole crowd, he stripped naked.

St. Philip Neri was so loved by people that they followed him around. He became nervous that they had fallen in love with him and not with God so he shaved off half of his beard and walked around looking like a fool.

Peter, when he found out that he would be crucified like Jesus, did not want to be killed like his master. That was too good for him. He loved Jesus too much to be crucified like him. So he insisted on being crucified upside down. Upside down!

They looked like fools, these saints. And they didn’t care because they were no longer thinking about themselves. They were too in love with God to worry about themselves.

The reason that we want to fall in love with God is that God knows who we truly are. Trying to be something that you are not will only get you so far. God knows you for the powerful, incredible person that you are and God wants you to become all that.

There is a story about a baby tiger who gets lost from his mother and ends up being raised by goats. He learns to bleet like them and to nibble grass. He grows into a large tiger but is simply behaving like a goat, bleeting and eating, nibbling and wandering. One day, the King Tiger comes to the forest.

He watches the young tiger bleet and nibble on the grass with the other goats. And he says to the Tiger, Come with Me.

He takes the young tiger to the river. Together, they look into the water. For the first time, the young tiger sees a reflection of himself. “You are not a goat,” says the King. “You are a tiger, like me. You do not nibble on grass. You were made in my image. You eat raw meat, like me.” And the King throws him the carcass of a dead animal.

“And you do not bleet nervously. You can roar, like me.” And the King let out a ROAR that shook the whole forest. And with that roar, the young tiger woke up to who he really was.

You are not two separate people, one at home and one in school. If you find yourself divided, unsure, nervously trying to find out who you are, then you have not really fallen in love with God. God will show you who you are. God will teach you not just how to speak, but how to roar.
Saints are simply people who fell in love with the true one. That’s all. They just fell in love.

Idolatry

2011-10-10T13:17:00.004-04:00

Last week, a hen came to church. It was St Francis day and her owner brought her at 10:30 inside instead of at 9 outside, where most of our animals were blessed. But this hen did a wonderful thing. She laid an egg in the back of the church. And the ushers sat there deliberating about whether or not they should put the egg in the offering plate. After all, this was her gift to us.

Every Sunday, we make this big procession and we put stuff on the altar. Why? Why do we bring up beautiful silver vessels and money? Sometimes the kids will draw pictures or pick a flower that is placed in their offering basket. Why do we do all this? What is the point?

In 2005, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. His cancer was a was a more treatable form. Most pancreatic cancer victims die within 6 to 8 months. Steve would live for six years, undergoing surgeries and inventing some of his most innovative technological tools. At a lecture at Stanford, Steve said this about his diagnosis...

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,"

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

One day, this man may be regarded as another Einstein, as the world’s greatest innovator. His name is already spoken in many households. China mourns him. All over the world, people are grieving a man who knew how to be truly creative.

Steve's life was not easy. Steve was an orphan. Born of a mother who was too young and could not raise him, he was adopted by Mr and Mrs Jobs. He only went through six months of college. At what should have been the height of his career, he was fired from one of his greatest jobs. At 50, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and instead of seeing all this as bad luck, or an occasion to feel sorry for himself, he saw every setback and every failure as a great opportunity. Steve seized life as a gift and he milked it for all its worth. He brought his best game to life, every day. And he changed the world.

Did you know that you won the lottery? Even if nothing good happens to you for the rest of your life and you die young and miserable, you still won the lottery. Because you were born. Stop for one minute and consider all the possible genes and chromosomes that could have been combined to create a person. The chance that you would be YOU is one in a million, literally. It is a miracle that you were born.

The first and greatest sin that is talked about over and over again in the Old Testament is the sin of idolatry. Remember the first of the ten commandments?

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.

Most of us have no idea what idolatry really means. We hear the story of how the Hebrew people got worried and anxious when Moses was talking with God in the mountain and they made a golden calf out of all their jewelry. And then they worshipped the god that they had made. We hear this story and we think, “OK, I don’t have to worry about that one. There is no way that I am going to be caught dead bowing before a golden calf! So I don’t have to worry about idolatry.” WRONG.

Let the calf go. We don’t do calves anymore. But we do idols. Believe me, we do worship idols.

What is an idol? It is anything that takes the place of God in your life. Anything that becomes more important than God to you becomes your idol.

Idolatry begins with the myth that you must be happy all the time. The myth continues when you start searching for something or someone to make you happy. Whatever that something is that will make you complete, that becomes your idol. Your family. Your money. Success. Your body. Your parenting. Your job. You tell me what it is, but there is something or somethingS in your life that rival God for your top priority. And whatever they are- these are your idols. They distract you from living life as a gift. You waste your time searching for them, serving them, and you are not fully alive.

Here are the voices of some of the idols. Maybe you will recognize them.

“If only I were thin, I’d be happy.”

“I have to raise the PERFECT kids.”

“If I had more money, I would be happy.”

“I need to succeed to be respected. I must be respected!”

Idols tell you that there is something in your life more important that your relationship with God. And nothing makes God angrier than when you listen to them.

This miracle that is called your life, this is a gift to you from the Creator of the Universe. It is a gift, a party, a banquet. You were created not to fix the world or to keep God company but just for the sheer joy of it. God was dancing when God made you! God was playing. And God wants you to celebrate and relish this life, all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly. All of it is a gift.

In the parable that Jesus tells us today, a King throws a wedding feast. In Jesus’ day, there was nothing more special, nothing more fun that the celebration of a wedding. It was a feast that would last for days. People would sleep and eat and sleep again. The guests were treated lavishly. It was the best thing going.

This King invites guests, but the guests refuse to come, so he goes out on the street and invites anyone who wants to come, rich and poor alike. All are invited. But one man comes without a wedding garment.

It was customary to wear a white wedding robe. It was a sign of appreciation, a sign of gratitude, of respect. But this man did not wear one. And when the King asks him why, he says nothing. He is a free-loader, come to take part in the banquet but not to thank or respect, not to show his gratitude. So he is thrown out, into the outer darkness. Jesus describes this scary place as a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you ever listened to fingernails on a chalkboard? (My first grade teacher sometime would do that by accident. She had long nails. It would send chills up my spine. Think of that for all eternity. It is not pleasant.)

Life is a feast of tastes and sounds and sights. Life is a gift. Every day, when you open your eyes, you have been given a gift. You think that any of this really belongs to you, your clothes, your body even? It is all a gift from God. All of it. And God wants you to say thank you and most importantly, to enjoy it.

Steve Jobs had a choice about his life. He could have been grateful or he could have been bitter. He chose to wear the wedding garment, even when he was dying. He chose to relish every moment of his life, to make the most of it.
Many people are horrified by the notion that the King might throw a guest out. But God does get mad, there is no avoiding that fact. It is there in Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. God gets really mad. There is no sin greater and nothing that makes God angrier than when we waste our lives chasing after idols, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, going nowhere.

As Celie once put it in the book The Color Purple, “I think that it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and do not notice it...”

Why do we bring plates up to the altar every Sunday? We are showing you how to live. We are reminding you of the most important, first action that all of us should take, with each breath, each moment, each day. We are saying Thank you.

Francis

2011-10-03T10:56:00.000-04:00

When I was fourteen, I went to a Christian camp. It was called Northfield because it was held at a boarding school called Northfield. There were people of all ages there, adults, children, babies, elderly, We listened to a talk in the morning and then met in family groups, small groups where we could really talk about who we were.

The camp started on a Monday. By Wednesday, I was so overwhelmed by the love and caring of the people around me that I started to cry. Well, as you probably know, adolescent girls can really cry. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. I cried and cried and cried. All day, tears just poured down my face. And the worst part was that if anyone asked me, I couldn’t tell them why. I just cried. And I made a complete fool of myself.

That afternoon, I went to be by myself. I thought that maybe, if I was alone, I could pull myself together. I sat under this big, beautiful tree. And I just listened. Maybe all that crying had exhausted me. Maybe I had endorphins released from the tears. I don’t know. All that I know was that I felt at peace and, for the first time in my life, I really listened.

There was the sound of the wind rustling in the trees. The sounds of the birds chirping, playing. And deeper still, the sound of a far off dog barking, a rustling in the tree above me where a squirrel was moving. I imagined the bugs around and beneath me, in their eternal dance of movement. And I realized how alive this world was. I realized that this ground that I was sitting on, that it was full of life. There was life all around. I began to breathe deeply. And as I breathed, I began to pray…

Thank you, God, for life. Thank you, God for life.

In that moment, I needed nothing but a tree to lean on. The planet that God made was holding me up, sustaining me. And I was home.

St. Francis was a young man of wealth. He went to fight in wars, he partied, he drank and made friends. And then he encountered God. Jesus spoke to him. And his whole life changed. He went in front of the bishop and stripped naked, handing his clothes over. He realized that he did not need anything but God. That he didn’t want anything but God. He realized that his stuff was holding him back from becoming the man that God was calling him to be. So he put on the robes of a poor man and began to walk.

Francis went to the church in San Damiano and looked at the cross. A voice spoke to him,

Francis, rebuild my church.

And so he did. He went and asked each member of the town to give a stone, just one stone. Some were angered by his asking. But most gave and the church was rebuilt.

And over a thousand years later, who do we remember?

Do we remember the rich people, the people who held onto their stuff? No, we remember the poor man, the man who knew who he was, a child of God.

Francis would walk outside and he would see something beautiful. He would see the sunset or the birds lifting as a flock out of a tree. He would see a donkey pulling a load or a flower in bloom and he would become so moved that he just started to cry. He would enter into a state of ecstasy. People thought he was mad. He would speak to the sun and to the moon.

Brother sun, he said.

Sister moon. He loved the animals and touched them, seeing them as manifestations of God’s great handiwork. He simply adored all of creation. And he loved being alive.

You might say that Francis was rich. He was rich because he was free. He did not let himself be burdened by things, by concerns about finances or time management. He simply let God take over all of that. He was a child and God the adult. And God made so much of his little life. God brought thousands of people closer to God because of the small life of one, simple man.

God calls us to be free. You need not be concerned with how you will pay your bills or how you will dress yourself. God will take care of you. It is true. But most of us just are too afraid to trust. So we hide behind our stuff and make excuses for why we cannot give enough, why we do not truly devote our lives to God.

And no matter how far along you get in the Christian walk, there is still so much farther to go. My husband and I give ten percent of every income check we get. It has become a joyful process for us. And yet, we have so much and we still hold to so much. And I know that God calls us to be more like Francis, to give more and to live more simply. But I get scared. So the only thing that I know how to do is just take one step closer.

This fall, the church is asking you to create a Rule of Life. Francis lived by one. It is a way of beginning to be intentional about your life. Will you live your life or will your life live you? How can you take one step closer to financial generosity, one step closer to praying regularly, one step closer to caring for your body, one step closer to caring for your loved ones? A Rule of Life is not complex. Actually, it is about simplicity. Once you decide how you want to live, then you can say no to everything else.

St Francis said, Begin with the necessary, move to the possible and soon, you will be doing the impossible.

Learning to trust God is a life-long journey. It takes lots of time and lots of trust. Francis was able to do it fully. He trusted God fully and God made his life sing. With his body and his mind, he glorified God. And we remember him today.

Don’t you realize that you really don’t need all this stuff? Remember the movie Contact? Jodie Foster is to travel into outer space in a ship designed by unknown aliens. The builders make the ship exactly as specified but with one change, they have to have a chair for her to sit on, something attached to the wall, “just minimal protection,” the man says. “Just to keep you safe.”

So she begins her journey. And as she travels through time and space, she is shaking uncontrollably. Every part of her body is vibrating with a force that is just painful to see. Meanwhile, her necklace comes loose and it floats in front of her, peaceful and flowing in the air.

So she unbuckles herself from the chair. She lets it go. And sure enough, she is floating peacefully. She knew it all along, all she had to do was trust the initial designer.

Jesus said, “Thank you, Father, for you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to children.”

You have to trust, like a child. You have to be a child. Trust that God will care for you, that the earth was made just right, to care and provide for you. And even if you die beneath a tree, you are OK. You are well.

How much do you really need? Could you simplify your life and give more? Can each of you give one stone so that we can rebuild and care for this house of God? Could each of you give money so that we can serve the Lord, worship and visit the sick?

I can just picture Francis standing there naked. He knew the truth. That you can’t take any of it with you, nothing.

You came into the world naked. You will leave the world naked.

Simplify your life. Give away your stuff more and more. And be free

Remembering September 11th

2011-09-12T11:14:00.002-04:00

When I was a child, my parents built a bomb shelter in the basement. It was the height of the Cold War. We lived in New Haven Connecticut where the Yale intellectuals were telling us that nuclear war was simply a matter of time. We watched the movie The Day After in which we saw the effects of nuclear war. Most likely the Soviets would strike New York City, so New Haven would receive residual effects. Our hair would all fall out, our bodies slowly disintegrate. Only cockroaches would survive.

Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, I would go down into the basement. It was usually at night. I would run my hands over the thick walls filled with sand until I found the light switch. Then I would sit alone in that tiny room. We had some cans in the corner, bottles of water. I felt safe in there but I also felt sad, lonely, even depressed. I remember thinking, “If we are ever attacked, why would we even come down here? What kind of life is this?”

When the Hebrew people were fleeing from slavery, God rescued them. In this dramatic scene, full of violence and hope, God parts the sea with a huge wind, leaving dry ground in the middle. The Hebrew people travel safely with God as their protection. And then the enemies come, and God destroys them. God is so active, so protective, so brilliant. It is a wonderful moment, a moment remembered for thousands of years. God fought for us!

I want to know why. Why didn’t God blow a great east wind when the first plane came towards the World Trade Center? Why didn’t God push that plane off course, make it land somehow?

We never thought that an airplane could become a weapon until that day. When the first plane hit, I thought it was a terrible accident. The pilot lost control. I could not fathom a person deliberately flying a vehicle full of people into a building. How could someone think like that? How could they even consider it? And later, we would hear about how they were crying out Allah Akbar! They were calling to God…Calling to God while performing an act of unspeakable evil.

When a tragedy of this magnitude happens in the life of a human being, we cannot make sense of it, so we retreat. How could this happen? How could God let it happen? We go inside of ourselves. We don’t know how to explain it and it hurts so much, so we run away, deep inside ourselves. When a young woman is raped and beaten almost to death, she changes dramatically. She hides within herself. When a child is molested or wounded, when a loved one dies in a tragic accident, we go into the bomb shelters of our hearts and we hide there. There is very little light in the place where we go, but it is safe. And we need safety. We need safety because we are afraid.

Some of you may think that we are making too much of this day, this tenth anniversary of 9/11. You may think that this country has gotten over it, but I think that most Americans have not gotten over it. Some have buried it deep inside. Others have just tried to forget it. On that day, and for a few days afterwards, we were united as a country. We cared for one another and valued one another. And then, when the chaos died down and the immensity of the event began to sink in, we hid from the pain and went back to bickering amongst ourselves.

In the Episcopal Church, like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, we have Scripture assigned to us each Sunday so that we read the entire Bible within the space of about three years. Today’s gospel is assigned for today. I did not select it myself. And in this gospel, Jesus talks to Peter about forgiveness.

“How many times must I forgive my neighbor?” Peter asks. “Seven times?”

“Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” Jesus replies. Over and over and over again. You must forgive over and over and over again.

Does this mean that God is telling us to forgive the terrorists – those 19 hijackers and their leaders who slaughtered innocent people on that beautiful September morning? And how in the world can we do that? I myself do not know how. How can you forgive an act of unspeakable violence, an evil act which ends in the death of thousands of men and women, an act that left hundreds of children motherless and fatherless? How is that possible? And is it even the right thing to do?

The ancient word for forgiveness is afiemee. Let me first tell you, very clearly, what it does NOT mean. It does not mean to forget. It does not mean to say that everything is OK. It does not mean to like the one who hurt you. It does not mean to go back to life the way that it was before you were hurt. And it does not mean that you will ever be the same.

Afiemee means just one thing: Release from bondage. Release from imprisonment. It means that one day, when you are ready, you leave the bomb shelter deep in the basement of your heart and you learn to live again. It means that, one day, you will no longer be afraid.

We need to understand that God did not leave us to die alone that morning. God was there, in the towers. God ran into the buildings with the firefighters. God held hands with the chaplains and prayed. God stood by the windows as people got ready to jump. And God was there in the rubble and the dust, crying.

That’s what Jesus came to tell us, that God stays with us in the midst of tragedy and violence. God never leaves us.

9-11 is our cross. It is an event which has marked us as a nation and we have been changed forever. We will never be the same. But we have not yet experienced the full forgiveness of God, of our enemies, or of ourselves. We have not yet experienced true resurrection. We have imprisoned ourselves since that day. Never has this country been more divided than it has since that day ten years ago. We are fighting amongst ourselves in ways that go beyond the normal differences of political parties. And this must end.

In my first year out of college, I worked in an emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital. One day, I was called to the burn unit to translate. A Russian man had been brought over to this country for treatment. I went to his room.

The curtains were drawn and the room was quite dark. “Come closer,” he said. “The light hurts my eyes.” I found out that he had been just 18 years old when he was asked by his government to fly over a town called Chernobyl and drop cement onto the site of an accident there. He wore a protective suit but his hands and his face were burned. The cancer had spread all over his skin and into his bloodstream. He was swollen and red, his hair was singed off. “I am here so that they can study my illness he said. I know that I am going to die. All my life I have wanted to see America. But the light hurts my skin and my eyes so much that I cannot go outside.”

After a few days and much paperwork and discussion, some of the nurses and I managed to get permission to take the Russian soldier outside. We covered him with strips of cloth, even over his face and hands. He wore dark sunglasses. We took him to my old station wagon. And we drove him around America. I will always remember his words, ‘I see it, Kate!” he said, “I see it!” He died three days later.

My Russian friend had the courage to leave his little room even when he knew that he was going to die, to see the light even though it hurt his eyes. We need to have the same courage, the courage to forgive, to be released from bondage.

Our country has always had this remarkable spirit, this remarkable gift of freedom and creativity, the ability to make something new and inventive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Jesus tells us to lift up our cross and follow him. That means that we are not to forget 9-11 but to let it become part of who we are. We are to define ourselves not by our hatred but by our ability to step out in the future. To lift it up and remember it as a day on which everything changed for us.

This is a day of remembrance. We will toll bells for those who died. It is also a day of hope, for there will come a time when we will stop bickering with each other and remember who we really are. There will come a day when we are ready to join hands again and step out into the light.

I don’t know when or how forgiveness happens. It is a gift from God. You know when you have forgiven, it just happens to you, from within. Suddenly, you are no longer afraid. I pray for that day, for all of us, when we can join hands once again and together step into the

Facing the Music: The Stuff of Relationships

2011-09-05T12:40:00.003-04:00

On January 12, 2007 at 7:51 a.m., a young man began to play the violin in a Washington DC metro station. He put his case on the ground and played a number of pieces for almost an hour and a half as the commuters rushed by. At the end of the morning, he had $37.07 in the violin case.

This man’s name was Joshua Bell. Just three days prior, Bell played in Boston’s Symphony Hall. It was sold out. Tickets were at least $100 each. Joshua’s talent can bring in $1,000 per minute. He plays on a 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius. But this morning, only seven people stopped to listen out of over 1000 who passed by. And, of the seven who stopped, just one recognized him. Just one lone man.

Why did no one stop to listen? Why did no one hear the music? I believe part of it was that they simply did not expect beauty in such a mundane place. This was a workday. They were trying to get somewhere. There was no room and no time for music, so they passed him by.

Back in the days of Moses, the ideal relationship with God was one in which God passed you by. The Hebrew people feared God. Their main objective was simply to stay alive. So when God commanded that they slaughter a young lamb, they did so precisely as ordered. They spread the blood on the lintels of their doors, just as God commanded. They did all this to survive, for they knew God to be a God of terror and anger, who made the earth but who could just as easily unmake it. So they obeyed and their obedience and discipline protected them. God was pleased with their efforts and, on the greatest of Jewish holidays, God passed over. And Pharoah, who had tried to kill the Hebrew boys, he got his just desserts when God killed the Egyptian boys instead. It is a bloody tale of a people who are rescued from slavery because they do everything that God tells them to do.

Once the Hebrew people got out there in the desert, they found it hard to follow the details of God’s will. God got so specific, so very specific. They had to wash their hands this way and eat that way. And when people died, they assumed that God was punishing them for messing up the details. They became consumed with the law, trying to follow it so perfectly. They never seemed to get it right.

When Jesus celebrated the Passover with us, he changed its meaning forever. He told us that it is not what we eat or how we cook that is important to God. No, rather it is how we treat one another. Our relationships are important to God.

My friend Barbara found a perfect little church when she was in high school. Her parents never went to church, but there was something about it that drew her like a magnet. When she came to visit, the elderly women were so good to her. They took her to coffee hour and made sure that she had a home-made cookie. She felt welcomed, at home. So she came faithfully for two years.

In her junior year, Barbara decided to bring two boys to church with her. She could not believe that they agreed to come. They had long hair and played in a rock band. She knew that they did drugs sometimes, but they seemed really nice. She thought that they would love it.

When she got to church, Barbara sat in the back pew. She liked it there, she liked seeing everyone. Her friends sat beside her. At the peace, one of the sweet women turned around to hug Barbara and she came up short before the boys. She looked strange, angry somehow. Barbara could not believe it.

After the service, Barbara sat in the pew with her two friends and no one said hello. The women who she loved just walked on by. As if she did not exist. They walked on by.

Years later, when Barbara described this experience to me, I asked her if she had ever confronted those women. She had not. She just left the church. For two years, she did not attend anywhere. It took her two years just to get over it.

Yes, you might say, I know that I have to love my neighbor. But many of us fail to understand what that means. We think that Jesus meant that we are supposed to get along with everybody. We think that we are supposed to be always kind, always cheerful, never angry. “He is not a good Christian,” people will say of someone with a temper. But what in the world do they mean?

Jesus knew that we human beings are broken. He knew that we would not get along a lot of the time. He knew that we get in bad moods and get over judgmental, that we gossip and complain. He did not tell us to be nice all the time or never to get angry. Jesus himself got rip-roaring mad! No, instead he gives us a set of instructions for how to live in community. And these instructions are every bit as detailed and intricate as God’s instructions to the Hebrew people on the eve of the Passover, except they do not have anything to do with food. These instructions are all about relationships.

When someone in the church sins against you, go to that person and tell them what they have done to you. And if that person is sorry, you have regained that one. If the person does not recant, then bring a few witnesses, two or three to be exact, and state your grievance before them. If the person still does not say that they are sorry, tell it to the church. And if that doesn’t work, say goodbye, or as Jesus put it let that person be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

You are not supposed to avoid conflict, you are supposed to go to it. Go to it. If someone wrongs you, you are supposed to make that clear to them. And you have to try at least three times. Then, if they do not seem to be able to see where you are coming from, you must say goodbye. Let me repeat that. Jesus wants you to say goodbye. Trying to relate to someone who cannot or will not acknowledge their fault is fruitless and it must end.

When you and I are able to truly be together in church, to serve God and love each other, to communicate and share a common vision, there is nothing that God will not do for us. God will be there to grant us whatever we ask. That is the promise. Whatever we ask!

But instead, we decide that it is not worth it to talk to the person who upset us. It is just too much of a bother, just too hard, too disturbing. They are not really worth it anyway, or maybe we talk ourselves out of being upset. Maybe we try to pretend that everything is OK, meanwhile a tiny piece of our truth dies inside. And we pass them by.

Whenever we pass by someone who wrongs us and do not give them the opportunity, yes, opportunity to hear our grievance, we pass by the music of God just to get on with life as usual.

Can you believe how important our communication is to God? It is vital, for God comes to us in those brief and inexplicable moments when we are truly listening to one another. And when we avoid conflict, we avoid the possibility of God coming among us.

I myself hate conflict. I have to force myself to go to the person who has upset me. Sometimes I have to write it down, I feel things so strongly. But God wants us to go to our disagreements, not away from them.

I know that all of you have complained behind someone’s back. I know that I have. It is just so much easier! I get to let off some steam, talk to someone who agrees with me, feel justified. And then I just pretend that it didn’t even happen. I never speak to the person who upset me.

I am just beginning to realize that God sees those times as lost opportunities. Some of God’s greatest revealing work is done in conflict and in disagreement. We don’t have to boil the lamb just right, but, in some ways, we have to do something even harder. We have to learn not to run away from people that upset or disappoint us.

Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, Jesus says. These relationships of ours, they are somehow integrally part of our salvation. If we cannot communicate with someone, and we have to let that person go, that person is gone to us, even in the hereafter. This stuff is important. This is the music of the ages. It is time for us to wake up and listen.

The Christian is NOT someone who gets along with everybody. The Christian is the one who has the courage to NOT get along and to do something about it.

If we never disagree, then we cannot know the beauty that comes with true connection. If we cannot consider estrangement, then there is no real unity.

If two of you agree on earth about anything, it will be done for you. But we must listen to each other and allow ourselves to disagree if we are ever to truly agree about anything. We must stop, turn and listen. And God will make music with us.

I See You

2011-08-15T10:46:00.001-04:00

She came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Matthew 15:26-28

Mothers can be powerful when they are desperate for their children.

My own mother stands at about 5 feet and 4 inches. One morning, when I was a teenager, I fainted in the shower. When my mother heard my body hit the ground, she pulled the entire bathroom door off its hinges. The bathroom door was locked. We had to get a repairman to come and put the door back on.

In the gospel, we hear about a mother. This woman had a little baby girl. She loved her child, that much is very obvious from the gospel. She loved her little daughter with all her being. But one day, that little girl began to have fits. We don’t exactly know what those fits looked like, but the mother claimed that her daughter had been seized by a demon

I have always imagined that her little one became epileptic and that those seizures were violent and terrifying. Her little girl one day must have begun to writhe and jerk, to foam at the mouth and then go limp. Her child just would suddenly have been lost to her, present one moment with smiles and then she became a frightening mass of flesh. She would wet her pants and bite her tongue. And her mother was desperate, absolutely desperate.

In the days of Jesus, women amounted to nothing. And Canaanites were considered not even human, not worthy of being taught about God. They worshipped idols. They were lost to God and were not to be saved. This is what Jesus had been taught.

When Jesus passes by, this mother races up to him and begs for him to help her daughter. And Jesus does not even answer her. All of his life, he had been taught not to speak to Canaanites. They were dogs, not worthy of attention. But the woman will not give up. Her desperation for her daughter drives her to assert herself in ways that were unfathomable back then. She yells and screams at Jesus.

“Send her away,” the disciples say. And Jesus tells her that he cannot take the food that is meant for the Jews and feed it to the dogs. I have always been bothered by these words, for they seem so unfair, but they were what Jesus had been taught. He was simply parroting what he had heard all of his life.

“Yes, Lord,” she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs from under their master’s table.”

And with her powerful words, Jesus looks at the woman. He looks at her and he really sees her. He sees beyond all that he has been taught. He sees a human being with tremendous faith. He sees a mother who adores her daughter. He sees as broken woman who would who do anything, anything to make her child well. And Jesus realizes that everything he has been taught is wrong. “Woman,” he says, “great is your faith.” And when he recognizes her, her prayers are answered.

When Joseph was ruling Egypt, he was busy distributing food to all the hungry people, when his brothers came to him. His brothers, who in their jealousy and envy, had sold him as a slave when he was just a child, come to ask for food. And at first Joseph does not let them know who he really is. He impresses them with his wealth and his power, scaring them by making it look like one of them had stolen something from him, keeping one of them hostage in his prison. But eventually he gets tired of playing games, and when they tell him that their father cannot bear to lose another son, Joseph sends all the servants out of the room. Then he breaks down and cries. He wails so loudly that people can hear throughout the palace. It is as if the truth is just bursting out of him. “I am Joseph, whom you sold as a slave,” he says.

The Scripture says that, at that moment, the brothers of Joseph open their eyes and they see him. They see who he truly is: a powerful man, the man who will save their family from famine, but also their little brother, who was mistreated by them, that little boy that they threw into a pit and sold as a slave. For the first time in their entire lives, they see him for who he really is. When they were children, they did not really see him. All that they saw was this annoying little brother, a brat, a braggart. His words made them angry, they despised him. But when Joseph the ruler reveals himself to them, and their eyes are open, they see him as he truly is, as their brother and also as a great man. And they are able to love him, no longer to be jealous or violent, but simply to love him for who he is.

If only we could see one another as Joseph’s brothers saw him, as Jesus saw the Canaanite woman. If only we would look at the person in the next pew and really see them, struggling to do the best they can, a person of great beauty and enormous depth. But instead we waste our lives living under an illusion, that everyone else is happy, and that we alone are broken and in need of God’s grace.

There was a young woman who went to college with me. We sang in the choir together. I knew her name. One night, we were sitting together on a couch in the choir lounge and she asked me if she could come and hang out with me and my friends. She explained that she didn’t really have any good friends. I said sure, but I got busy and never really thought about it.

Three weeks later, she hung herself by an extension chord in her dorm room.

At her funeral, I had terrible feelings of guilt. And I kept talking to her inside my mind. I would ask her over and over again, “Why? Why could you not have shown me who you really were? I had no idea that you were in so much pain! Why didn’t you tell me?”

She had given me a glimpse of her loneliness but she had glossed over it, making it sound like something that she wanted to work on, not something that was tearing her apart inside. I did not really know who she was. Had I known who she was, I would have rushed over to her dorm room and introduced her to everyone I knew. I would have tried to help her. If only I had known. But I never really saw her.

We go through our lives hardly seeing one another. You can come to church and sit next in the same pew with someone for months and never know that the person is getting a divorce or that their father is dying of cancer. We say hello to one another. We say, “How are you?” and the expected answer is “Fine.” That’s all most of us want to hear, “Fine.” There is this social expectation that we will not really tell the truth, not really tell each other about our pain or our struggles. So we say fine.

It’s only places like Alcoholics Anonymous where people are forced to be brutally honest. Their addictions force them to the tell truth up front about who they are. They are told to say, “Hello, My name is Frank. I am an alcoholic.” But in the rest of the world we don’t do that, we don’t say, “Hello, My name is Jennifer. I am estranged from my sister.” Or “Hello, my name is Dan. I suffer from chronic depression.” Or “Hello, my name is Sally. I am lonely.” Instead, we just say, “I’m fine.” And we tell each other where we live and what we do for a living. And we do not know one another at all.

Look at the person next to you. See them. That person is unfathomable, deep and full of mystery. That person has experienced pain and suffering. That person is beloved of God.

I have started taking yoga. At the end of the class the teacher puts her hands together like this, and she says a Hindu word, Namaste. I have been saying it for months. But only a few days ago did someone tell me what it means. It means, I See You.

Esau's Blunder

2011-07-11T13:55:00.004-04:00

And so, Esau despized his birthright.
Genesis 25:34

"I am going to another church."

"But why?" I asked. "Why are you leaving?"

"I just went to a Bible study and felt that God wanted me to go…"

And so the conversation goes. I find it so hard when someone decides to go somewhere else to church, but our back door must be open as our front door is open. This is not a cult and I cannot force people to stay. But it does break my heart.

It is not uncommon for the new member, feeling so moved and inspired at first, will one day come to church and find it so so, and it is at that point that they begin to look for another church home, a place where they can find that emotional high again. And they will move from church to church, seeking that feeling of being inspired. They will leave whenever someone disappoints them, when they have a disagreement, when they get bored.

The divorce rate is at an all-time high in this country. More and more people are falling out of love just as easily as they fell in love. They will come and tell me that they no longer love each other, but what they really mean is that they don’t have the in-love feeling anymore. And without that exciting feeling, they just don’t want to stick it out. From this new perspective, marriage is much less romantic and much more like hard work.

Jacob and Esau were brothers, twin brothers. They fought all the time. They even fought in their mother’s womb (Esau won that battle and came out first). And they were so different. Esau was read and hairy. Jacob was bare and pale.

Their parents made this competition worse by playing obvious favorites. Their father loved Esau best, their mother loved Jacob. Esau was a practical man, an impatient man. He was a hunter, used to being on the move. His brother was quieter, more thoughtful. It was Esau’s impatience that was his downfall.

One day, Esau came back from hunting and he was famished. And I don’t mean normal hunger, I mean the hunger of a growing young man who had just finished at least one full day of strenuous exercise. Esau could think of nothing but food.

I can just imagine the tent. The smell of sweaty exhausted Esau must have competed with the smell of the cooking. Esau would drop down on the floor of the tent in pure exhaustion. All he would want is some food. His mind would be totally focused on that one thing, food.

And Jacob had soup. Not just soup, stew, the red lentil stew. The kind whose scent can fill an entire house while it is cooking, making your mouth water and your stomach ache. Jacob had the stew. There was not enough for both of them.

“Give me some of that red stuff,” Esau says. He was a man of few words, and he meant what he said.

Jacob asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew and Esau, thinking only of the surface of life, agrees. He gives up the line of the patriarchs, the favor of God, for broth and vegetables.

In American culture, we believe that the faster something is accomplished the better. But fast is not always best. And those who seek results quickly may give up their birth-right for stuff.

Think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan said, “Just take it. Don’t think about it. I know God said not to, but don’t think about that too much. Just take, just do it!”

How often the greatest mistakes in our lives are made because we did not give ourselves time to spend with God, time to wrestle with God, time to absorb and grow. The spiritual life is not like McDonalds. You don’t pull up to church in your car for McEucharist. We ask you to come week after week, month after month, to pray and to give regularly. This is a way of life that takes time to foster and grow. It is not instant gratification. It is called discipleship.

When Jesus speaks to us about the spiritual life, he speaks to us in terms that come from nature. He knew that the people of the Galilee would know about rain and harvest, plants and vines. He knew that this was their language and when he used these images, they would relax, open their hearts, and listen.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses images of seeds falling on the ground. The seeds are made by God and they are good stuff. The seeds are the presence and love of God, which God showers upon you like rain, upon the good and the evil, the children and the elderly, the strong and the weak. God showers love and grace upon us all in equal amounts. The question is not whether or not God loves us, it is what we will do with that love and grace.

We are the soil. We are the ones who receive his grace, his love, his patience and kindness. But our soil varies a great deal depending on the kind of life that we have led. And good soil takes time to become rich and fertile.

Do any of you have compost piles? If so you know the process. God takes the experiences of our lives, our mistakes and our failures, and God lets them distill down within us, decomposing down into rich, fertile soil. The process takes time. Christians are baptized once and for all, but disciples take years to be formed.

I want to encourage all of you not to sell your birthright. You are a child of God, baptized and beloved. This world will ask you over and over again if you would like to trade in that birthright for a successful career, for romance, for respect. Just tell a lie, the snake will say. Just make fun of that person, don’t think about it, just do it. Just take that drug, that drink. Just gossip, cut someone down, hurt. It’s not that serious. Don’t think too much about it. Everybody else is doing it.

And before you know it, you have traded God in for popularity, for some money, for a good time. And you are left with nothing.

Seeds cannot live for long in shallow ground. They may spring up, but they will wither and die if they are not deeply rooted in the soil of life. Life with God takes time and it takes commitment. It takes years of love and generosity, prayer and community. It takes time.

God causes us to grow, not just in the inspired moments, but in the humdrum, the day in and day out faithfulness of life. Don’t chase the high, even if you are hungry for excitement or think that you must have something now. Be patient.

You have been given the most precious gift in the world. Don’t hand it off for ANYTHING.

This fall, we are not going to do a pledge drive. Instead we are going to ask you to make a life pledge. I am going to get you to think of your life as a gift to God, a long-term gift. How will you pray? What will you do to form a small group that meets weekly? What will you give? How will you devote time to your loved ones? How will you care for your body?

And you will say, why. Why are we being asked to pledge all these parts of our lives? Because true discipleship takes a long time. It takes consistency and devotion. It takes a lifetime of prayer and a true community of people who know you intimately and meet with you regularly. It takes commitment.

And so, Jacob became the father of nations while Esau gave all that up for STEW.

God bless poor Esau. Let us not make the same mistake.

Freedom

2011-07-04T15:15:00.000-04:00

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, soldiers from this country fought against one another at the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 3rd of that year, the Confederate army charged the Union army on Cemetery Ridge in what would become known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union army fought off the Confederate soldiers with artillery fire. Young men died in droves. In the three day battle, 50,000 men died. Never has the United States lost more lives than we did in the war that we waged against ourselves.

I am from the North, a Yankee by ancestry. My husband is a Southerner, his family fought on the Confederate side. Sometimes I think about that Battle, how brother fought against brother and died. Blood soaked that field on that day. Men who could have loved one another were driven to kill one another.

Abraham Lincoln would later say that it happened so that the liberty of all people could be restored. And that is what we give thanks for today, for our freedom. We give thanks to God today for this country and for the freedom that we all enjoy, the freedom to argue and disagree, the freedom to make decisions move and live where we wish. The freedom to be able to gather here in church and worship God without fear. Unless you have visited countries where there is no freedom, you cannot even begin to understand what we have here. It is part of the air we breathe, the fact that we are free. We take it for granted.

God wants you to be free. God wants us all to be free, but there are many kinds of bondage. And the bondage that is worst of all occurs when we are unable to forgive.

In the gospel, Jesus tells us that we are to pray for our enemies, that we are to love them. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “Just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It is the highest form of love, the love of your enemies. I cannot say that I am very good at it. It is the stuff that makes the gospel unique in every way. It is at the heart of the message of Jesus. We are to pray for those people who hate us and persecute us. Pray for them and love them.

This means that, as a country, we must pray for Al-Quaida. This means that, as an individual, you must pray for the woman who hates your guts and tells everyone how awful you are. And you can’t just pray for her to fall into a deep pit. You must pray for her wellbeing.

Why must we pray for our enemies? Because if we do not forgive them, our hatred and resentment will drive us to pieces.

In the movie True Grit, a 14-year-old girl named Maddie goes on a hunt for revenge. Her father was killed by a man named Tom Cheney. She considers it her duty to hire killers and avenge her father’s death. This act of revenge will set her free from the hatred and grief that consumes her. So she makes her way through the dust and violence of late 1800’s West to find a man who will act out her aggression. And once she has found him, a man with what she calls True Grit, she rides with him out into the wild to catch and murder this Tom Cheney.

It is a story of despair. The man she has hired is a drunk who has shot more men than he can count. They are accompanied by a Texas Ranger who is also on a mad hunt for the same man. When they finally come across this enemy, Maddie succeeds in shooting him, but the kickback from her gun sends her flying backwards into a pit where her arm is broken and she is bitten by a rattler.

Maddie’s life is spared but her arm is amputated. She never marries and spends her life remembering her trip of revenge. But she is not free. She is never free.

Not forgiving someone, it’s like drinking poison and hoping that the enemy will die. Maddie sought revenge and she consumed her life with it.

Be perfect, Jesus said. As your heavenly Father is perfect. The word in the ancient Greek is complete. Be complete, be whole. Do not drive yourself into pieces over the wrongs of another person. Forgive them, love them, and gain your life, gain your freedom.

Who is it that makes you really angry? Who is it that treats you unfairly or makes you feel unworthy? Everyone has someone who rubs them the wrong way. And many of the people who treat us poorly are very close to us.

Whoever it is that really makes you angry, whoever it is that really gets your goat, it is that person that you must study and come to understand, because they will teach you something valuable about yourself. If you are to declare your independence from them, then you must know them and even love them.

Think back to the Revolutionary war and the Declaration of Independence. This country was defined by its enemy. We wanted freedom from the tyranny of Britain. We wanted to be a people who were free to elect our own rulers, free to make our own decisions, pay our own taxes. It was Britain’s rule of us, Britain’s taxation without representation that brought us to know ourselves. You could say that our enemy was our best teacher. Because of our vehement need to define ourselves as free, we created a democratic nation. Our greatness was influenced most by our enemy. If we hadn’t wanted so badly to be independent, if we hadn’t wanted so badly to be free, we might not have become who we are today.

Do you want to be truly free? If you do then you must declare your independence from the ones who treat you worst by praying for them and yes, by loving them. By love, I don’t mean feeling all warm and fuzzy towards them and I don’t even mean that you should not defend yourself. I mean that you should understand them and want what’s best for them. I mean that you should trust God enough to place them in God’s hands.

We are defined more by our enemies than by our friends. So we’d better get to know them well.

At our wedding, some of JD’s relatives flew up North. These folks had never been to the North. JD’s tone-deaf Uncle Homer from Tennessee danced at the reception and sang out loud. JD hired a Memphis funk band and the southern blues rocked the house in Connecticut. North married South and it was a blast.

My brother and father decorated our Jeep with all the normal just married stuff. We were to drive down to Kennedy airport just outside of New York City the next morning. As we got into the city, something incredible happened.

Normally nothing makes me more frustrated than driving in New York City. It is like being trampled. Everyone is honking, there are no lanes, people lean out their windows just to swear at you. Everyone hates everyone, it is just part of the deal.

We landed in a traffic jam at a toll booth outside of the city. “Oh, no,” JD said. “This is going to last forever.”

Then something amazing happened. A souped up BMW, blasting rap music, beside us, honked his horn.

“JUST MARRIED! COME ON!!YEAH!!”

He let us in. Then another old junky car, with Mexican guys all crowded inside started cheering. The cars began to move. Audis and Vans, trucks and beetles. Everyone understood what had happened to us, everyone was honking and cheering. The lines just seemed to part. Everyone was smiling and waving. It was like the Kingdom of heaven.

I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt more free than that day, in the middle of a traffic jam.

If you truly want to be free, then you must love your enemies. Love them and forgive them.

Trinity

2011-06-20T11:05:00.000-04:00

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God moved over the waters.

This is the very first sentence of the Bible. And already we are talking about God in two forms, the One who creates and the Spirit who moves or the Hebrew means broodes or sweeps, wanders or dances. And the darkness, it covers the face of the deep, but the deep in Hebrew also means the chaos. And the Spirit moves over the face of the waters while God makes everything.

And when God speaks, God says, Let US make man in OUR image…”

Why Us? Why the royal We? For thousands of years, we did not understand why, but, then again, there was much about God that we did not understand.

Then Jesus came, and he told us that he was the Son of God, that he was one with the Father in Heaven. And we were more confused still. And just before Jesus left us, he instructed his followers to baptize and to do so In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Why did he say it this way?

It was not until the third century that theologians came up with the word TRINITY. The Three-in-One concept, a way of pointing to God. It is theology at its best. It is poetry. It tells us a deep truth about God.

God is One and yet God is three. And this makes no sense. Which is exactly the point. We cannot understand God and the Trinity, fundamentally, cannot be understood. Each time someone has tried to explain the Trinity rationally, their theory becomes a heresy. The Trinity is Mystery. Nothing can be one and three at the same time, it defies all rational explanation. But isn’t that just perfect for God?

The Trinity teaches us much about the nature of God. Not only can God not be understood, but God is not alone. God was never alone. We were not created because God was lonely. God has all community and all love within the Divine self. God is complete in a way that you are I are not.

And God is ever-changing, ever-moving. The number three is unbalanced, it is dynamic, it moves and changes. God is always doing a new thing. God is full of surprises.

A week and a half ago, Tim Tuller came to the organ to practice and found that he had company. There was a possum who seemed to have taken up residence in the choir stalls. So Tim consulted Robert Hyde, our properties manager, and they decided to set a trap for Mr. Possum. After all, it was essential to catch the beast. Having a possum join the choir on Sunday might not go over too well. So they put some meat in the cage and set the trap.

But there was just one problem, the possum did not take the bait. No one seemed to be able to catch the little beast. Until finally, on Sunday morning, one of the Vergers came to the rescue and caught the possum with a bucket. Don’t ask me how this was done, the Vergers are a group with many mysterious skills. But God did a new thing at this Cathedral, and we decided to feature a color picture of the possum in the E Eagle for posterity.

God is ever-moving, ever full of surprises. God is Trinity and the Trinity is not only mysterious, it is surprising. God as Trinity plays with us, dances with us. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are always wanting to show us a new thing. I think God brought us a possum to make us smile.

How could God be ever-changing and yet eternally the same? Again, it is beyond all human comprehension. Don’t even try to understand!

A few years ago, I was celebrating the Eucharist in Kansas. We were midway through the service. I had just made the announcements and was about to go up to prepare the altar when something happened. A voice came over the sound system…

THIS IS GOD.

I just stood there. Was there a drunk man who had gotten hold of a microphone? What was going on? Was it really God? There was nothing about this in the Prayer book…I just stood there for a moment and then I said, “Well, I’m glad that you’re here.”

I worried that God might speak again at the service and if so, I did not know what else to say. But God was silent. It was not until after the service that I discovered what happened. One of the older youth, whose voice had changed and had a deep baritone, was testing the microphone in the fellowship hall. For some unknown reason, it sounded in the sanctuary.

Open your eyes. God does new things with us every day. God comes up with new ideas and new plans. God plays with you and loves to show you a new thing. As Alice Walker wrote in her book, The Color Purple, “I think it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it…” God loves you and is ever changing, ever dancing with you.

I painted an icon this week. All my adult life, I have wanted to paint an icon. For well over 20 years, I have gazed at the face of Christ to say my prayers , looking at his face before I fell asleep each night and as I woke in the morning. I knew that I wanted to paint his face, but I also knew that I was not a painter.

I am the kind of person who buys paints and paper and with a lot of excitement, starts to paint. Then what gets put on the paper shocks me because it is terrible! I do not understand how to paint perspective, I don’t have a clue about color and I generally make a mess. So I had settled on coloring books with Max until this icon workshop came around.

We painted for 5 days from 8:30 to 4. We prayed and generally kept silence while we painted.

It was like loving Jesus every minute. I got to think about what his hands might have looked like, his face, his hair. And every day was full of surprises. I was shocked to see how much he looks like everyone I love, how much my own he is. The painting itself was full of surprises, new discoveries every day.

I want you to think of God not as something stagnant and boring, like some adult figure who sits stagnantly in heaven, observing your every move. Think of God instead as three-in-one, completely beyond your comprehension, yet always moving and dancing and loving. Like the ocean, think of God as always looking different to you, always revealing something new, something beautiful. Think of God as speaking to you in new and changing ways every day, through color and sight and sound. Wake up to the presence of the Holy Trinity that surrounds you and embraces your life. The more you look, the more you will see Him: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Are We There Yet?

2011-06-06T10:46:00.000-04:00

It took one hour to get from my childhood home in New Haven , Connecticut to Salem, where we got to see my cousins. One hour. And yet, it seemed like a lifetime. I remember vividly sitting in the backseat, fighting with my little brother and asking the same question over and over again, “Are we there yet?”

Sure enough, I hear echoes of my childhood self when we take road trips today. TV and games help, but there is still the same longing question that often comes from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” One time Max asked this question just twenty minutes into a trip from Kansas to Colorado. I did not have the heart to tell him how much we were not there yet. After all, his mind could not have grasped the ten hour trip at the tender age of two.

As we move further and further into the Easter celebration, we move deeper into the story of Christ’s resurrection. Today we remember how, after appearing to the disciples many times in the resurrected form, Jesus ascended into heaven. He left bodily, physically. And he would never come back in that way again.

But before Jesus left, the disciples asked him the same question that I asked my parents so long ago, the same question that Max asked me. Are we there yet?

The disciples wanted to know if this was it. Was this the end of the world, the time when Christ would come in all his glory and defeat all the darkness, the time for us to rise with him to eternal life? Was this it? Are we there yet?

And Jesus looks at them and gives them the same answer that he gives us two thousand years later, It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set…

It is not for you to know.

Just look at things from our vantage point today. We are now more than two thousand years after the ascension and still, we wait. The disciples could not have conceived of this. Their minds would not have grasped it. Just as you and I cannot grasp God’s timing today.

2012 has become the next hotspot in terms of end of the world foretelling. Evidently, the Mayan calendar ends on that year. Probably, this is because the Mayans could not conceive of the human race lasting longer than this, but many people have taken this to mean that the end of the world is to occur in 2012.

I do not believe any of this. You see, I truly think that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he told them that it is not for us to know. Whenever human beings get in the business of fortune telling, of trying to examine the future as if it is some game that God has given us clues to, some kind of puzzle that can be solved if we just piece together slivers of our lives or the lives of others, we make a mess and we waste our time. Jesus told us that this kind of thing is God’s business. We are not to know.

I walked through the MOSH museum yesterday. They have a great planetarium. There are photographs from the Hubble spacecraft: photographs of nebula, of whole galaxies dancing in the darkness, of blue stars and supernova. These photos represent events that are so vast and I cannot take in their size. They are so beautiful that I find myself wanting to stare at them for hours. They display the glory of God, a glory that is simply beyond human understanding. As I stood before them, I felt awe.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster is a scientist who courageously volunteers to travel light years away from earth in a ship designed by aliens. She sees beauty that is so spectacular, so beyond human comprehension, that she finds herself speechless. She tries to record all that she sees by speaking into a tape-recorder, but when she comes to the events of the cosmos, she pauses in great silence and she says, “They should have sent a poet….They should have sent a poet.”

Why is it so hard for us to simply not have the answers? Some things are simple to great for words. Some things simply cannot be described or calculated. Why can we not leave certain things up to God? The disciples wanted the whole story wrapped up in their life-times, they wanted it all clean and neat. What was about to happen was so much larger than that.

People will often ask me about the salvation of souls. When a man dies who was angry or who took his own life, I will be asked the question, “Is he going to hell?” But the truth is that I cannot answer, or I could answer but my answer would be insufficient. I do not know the times and I do not know the places. All I know is what Jesus promised, that if we know him and love him we will come to Him.

And whenever we get into the business of determining the salvation of others, we get in just as much trouble as we do when we try to figure out the schedule for the end of the world. We just make a mess of things. Why can we not simply leave this up to God? It is our job to tell others about Jesus and our love of him, but salvation is not for us to determine. It is God’s job, not ours.

When Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are left standing there staring after him. They no doubt are wondering where he went, wondering if he will come back. They don’t want to move on with their lives because that would confirm that he is gone, so they just stand there gaping. Two men, messengers of God, angels, have to appear and tell the men that he has gone, but that one day, he will come again in the same way that he left.

So the disciples go home, or the closest thing that they have to home. They go to the Upper Room and they meet together, lost and confused. And that is where the Holy Spirit comes.

If they had stayed looking up to heaven, trying to calculate Jesus’ next arrival, they might never have become the Church. The Holy Spirit came to them when they went back to their lives and tried to figure out how to live in the present moment. For the Holy Spirit does not come in the past nor does God live in the future. God meets us in the now and helps us to see more clearly now, not then, but now.

I would love to see Jesus come again. I would love for Him to come and make all the wrongs right, fix the brokenness of the world, ease the pain, punish the wicked. Sometimes I still look up to heaven and want to ask, Are we there yet? But every time I do, I just get this deep silence in response. For I cannot begin to fathom the answer.

When we were on our way to Colorado and Max asked that question, I leaned over from the front seat (JD was driving) and I looked at his little face. “It’s going to be a while, buddy,” I said. “But I will be with you every step of the way.”

Maybe that is the better question, instead of asking Jesus, Are we there yet or Jesus, Is so and so going to heaven, or Jesus What will happen next, what if we asked one simple question,

God, will you stay with me, every step of the way?

I think that God answers that question, for we can fathom His answer.

Yes, he says. Yes.

Sheep

2011-05-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

This past Friday night, the Baccalaureate service for Episcopal High was held at the Cathedral. The procession was very long, with well over a hundred seniors, faculty, Board of Trustees, Administration and clergy. Most of the seniors sat in the first few rows, but one row was directed to sit in wooden chairs in front of the altar rail. The vergers ushered them to their seats. They looked around, feeling uncomfortable. And then they all stood up and promptly left their seats, marching to the back of the transepts where they sat in folded chairs. When I got to the front, I wondered where they were. Once I located them in the back, I wondered if I should stop the service and herd them back to their assigned seats. I decided not to, but I thought to myself, "Ah, sheep!"

When the early Christians began to form a community, there were no processions and noformal liturgy, but they did have rules. And their rules were no joke. Many of us today would see their community as communist or at least monastic. They had no private ownership. Everyone brought their money and belongings to the community and the leaders divided it all up. In other words, everybody shared.

When Ananias and Sapphira sold their property, they only gave the apostles a portion of the income, holding back some of it for themselves. When Peter accuses Ananias, the man falls down dead. And later, when his wife comes in, Peter asks how much she sold the land for. She, too, lies and gives the lower price. Peter accuses her as well, and shows her the feet of her husband, who lies dead on the floor but the disciples have covered up his body with a sheet so only his feet are showing. When Peter accuses her of lying, Saphira too, falls down and dies.

It is not exactly an advertisement for private ownership. But how do we compare the community of the book of Acts with our lives today? It would be simply unacceptable for me to tell all of you that we are all going to share our money and belongings. It would be chaos. You would not accept that and even I would wonder if it was really a good idea.

I think that we get stuck on the ownership issue and fail to neglect the main point of the early Christians. That point being that they were really interconnected. For Peter and Paul, life as followers of Christ meant life together, as a group. You did not believe alone. You believed in community.

A man visited with me after a funeral a few weeks ago. He told me how the funeral meant so much to him, that it warmed his heart like some kind of resounding bell had been sounded deep inside, a bell that had been silent for a long time. I invited him to return to church.

“I’m spiritual, not religious,” he said. He told me that he prayed alone, in the morning. He liked to walk in the woods and contemplate the majesty of God. “I used to go to church, a long time ago. But the people disgusted me. They were so petty. I just figured I’d be closer to God out here.”

Being together is frustrating. It is much easier to pray alone. In church, we have kind people and we have jerks. Sometimes it is so hard to get along with one another that we can hardly worship. Believe me, there are times when I myself feel like fleeing out to some pasture alone to contemplate God. It would be a heck of a lot easier.

But the disciples saw the Risen Lord in community. Even Mary Magdalene, who saw the Lord alone, was told by him to go and tell the others that he had risen. Most of the Resurrection appearances were in the company of at least a few of the community. The Holy Spirit came to the Church when they were gathered in community. It is when we come together that God is most potently present.

“When two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them.”

Why? Why not just let us be church alone? It would be so much easier.

The reason why God told us to worship together is because God knew how very interconnected we are. We are not really ourselves unless we are together. Human beings are communal creatures. As much as we get into fights and skirmishes with one another, we function as one body. We were meant to be together, not alone.

Jesus tells us that we are like sheep. And sheep always travel in packs. If they wander off alone, it is usually bad news. Their safety and their salvation are in sticking it out together. And that is what we are supposed to do.

In America, we live by a myth called the Self. We truly believe that you can make yourself happy. We train you to think for yourself, focus on your own health, your body, your education, your career. We ask one another “How are you?” as if it is the individual whose mood is most important. And we neglect to recognize how much the lives of those around you affect your own happiness.

If a newborn baby is not held, it will die. So you must be held and supported and you must hold and support, in order to be fully alive. We sheep have to stick together.

Max and I are reading a book. It is called Follow the Drinking Gourd. It is about the Underground Railroad and how the slaves in the South were led to freedom before the Civil War. These slaves were taught a song by a man named Peg Legged Joe. Peg Legged Joe would hire himself out as a handyman to plantation owners. While he was working on the plantation, he would teach the slaves a song. Follow the Drinking Gourd, the song went, Follow the Drinking Gourd. The song had details about how to follow the Drinking Gourd, what we would call the Big Dipper, northwards to freedom. The song detailed markers along the way north. Once the slaves had the song well-memorized, Peg Legged Joe would move on to another plantation, to teach more slaves the song.

The bravest slaves would follow the song, letting the big dipper led them north to freedom by night. But the slaves would not have made it were it not for the people that they met on the way. They were hustled into barns, fed in secret rooms, hidden in wagons full of corn. Mile by mile they traveled on the wings of those they met. Without the community of the Underground Railroad, they would not have survived.

Think over your life for a moment. You would not be here were it not for the love of others. Someone fed you as a child. Someone gave you a job reference. Someone introduced you to your best friend, your spouse. Someone invited you to church. We do not exist apart from one another. We cannot survive without one another.

And so God comes most potently to us when we are together. In fact, I am not allowed to celebrate the Eucharist alone. It simply does not work. The bread and wine will not become the Body and Blood of Christ for me alone, only for us.

The early church knew that they must stick together. The disciples shared everything because they knew the truth, that everything is ours, not mine. My future belongs to my children, my past to my parents. Last Sunday I stood between our former Dean, Edward Harrison and our Seminarian, Quinn Parman, and I realized it that I was standing between the past and the future. I am part of something much larger than myself. That’s why we worship together, because this is much bigger than any one of us.

When you wake up in the morning, don’t just think about how you are doing, what your day will bring, think about us. Think about your church, your family, your country. How are WE doing? That is really the question. For you cannot really think of yourself apart from your community.

It is such a relief, the day that you leave me behind and begin to think about us. It is such a relief because not everything is up to you. You are one of the sheep. I am one of the sheep. And we are most joyful, most faithful, yes, most challenged, but most blessed when we are together.

Slow of Heart

2011-05-09T11:07:00.000-04:00

Did not our hearts burn within us as he walked with us on the road, as he opened the Scriptures to us?
The Gospel of Luke

When the two disciples were on the road to Emmaus, they were processing. So much had happened in the past week and they needed just to talk about it. They were trying to understand what had happened to Jesus and how to reconcile the rumors that they had heard about his resurrection. They must have been the kind of friends who just need to get away together and talk and talk about the events that transpired. Two extraverts who trust one another, they hoped to bring each other clarity, or at least a sense of closure. Their minds were working furiously trying to catch up with what had happened, and their hearts were troubled.

When Jesus met them, they did not recognize him. They thought that he was a stranger, a fellow traveler, so they used this opportunity to spill their guts to him. They told him everything, about how they wanted Jesus to be the Messiah and how he disappointed them by being crucified. They told him about how confused they were, about how Jesus died but people were saying that he had risen. All of this just poured out of them for they needed someone to talk to, someone objective who could clarify for them what all of this meant. Someone who was capable of listening.

When they finished their story, the stranger spoke. Now, we would expect him to console the disciples or to reflect upon what they said. But Jesus responded in the strangest way. He yelled at them. He chastised them. You Fools! He says. You are slow of heart.

You are slow of heart.

What does Jesus mean, slow of heart? When Jesus expresses his disappointment, he does not talk about their minds or their intelligence. He does not call them ignorant or stupid. Instead he talks about the state of their hearts. He is disappointed with the state of their hearts.

What is so important about the heart and what does the heart have to do with recognizing God?

Sam Grinstead was a doctor. He came to Baltimore and found himself partnering with an older doctor who ran a thriving general practice out of his old Victorian home in a nice section of downtown. It seemed natural when Sam proposed marriage to the doctor’s youngest daughter, Delia. She was her father’s favorite, so pretty, newly graduated from college. She seemed content to be his secretary and his wife. She was fifteen years younger and seemed to adore her new husband. She never had to move out of her childhood home and when her father died, her husband just took over.

Sam and Delia had three children, two boys and a girl. They both worked hard to bring in new patients and send their children to private schools. Sam depended on Delia for everything. Delia busied herself not just with secretarial work but with carrying her children from one place to the next, filing medical insurance bills for the practice, telephoning patients, making lunches, volunteering in school.

By the time that their youngest child was 15, Delia felt as if she were suffocating. Her chest hurt and she could not explain why. Without being able to articulate anything, she left her husband suddenly, walking away on the beach at a family vacation and hitching a ride to a small town an hour away. She rented a room and went to work for a law firm as a secretary. Everyone thought that she was crazy. She left a good man, a doctor at that. And what about her three children? Even she thought that she What kind of a mother was she? Even Delia herself thought that maybe she was crazy, but something was hugely wrong with her married life. Her heart was just breaking.

The more she reflected the more she realized. Her husband did not even look at her. He did not know her. He did not know how she had changed and how she felt. He did not know when she was sad or angry. He never listened to her or asked her questions. They lived like two strangers alone in a marriage. And her heart was dying.

When she left, Sam began to realize what he had done. It hit him all of a sudden, late at night. He realized that he had never hit her or abused her in any way. But he had not seen her. She had become invisible to him because he thought that he knew her. He would have told everyone that he loved is wife. But in reality, he did not love her at all. He just cared for her. He did not really even know who she was.

When Peter steps out before a crowd of Jews in the beginning of the Book of Acts, he tells them that they missed the Messiah. He tells them that the man that they crucified, the man that they hated, this Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the promised savior of God. And they had not even recognized him. They thought that they knew who he was, but they were wrong. They were not listening. And they had made a terrible mistake.

When Peter says this, the Scripture says that the Jews were cut to the heart, just like Sam was cut to the heart when he realized the truth about his marriage. The heart often knows things that the mind cannot grasp or reason. And sometimes, when we say that we know someone, we made up our minds about this person and we really do not know them at all.

The Book of Acts is a story about a change of heart. The people who become the first Christians did so because their hearts are changed. They learned how to listen to God. They learned that God often does new and different things, things that we could never have guessed or predicted. They learned that we cannot assume that what we thought was right yesterday is right today. They learned to love God with their hearts and to live their lives by this love.

Love means never defining a person but being open to the fact that they are unfathomable, capable of surprising you and changing you. To love someone is to honor the mystery of God within them. Love is something that is always listening, always honoring, never fully comprehending. The moment we cease to listen to one another is the moment when we cease loving one another.

When Delia came home for their daughter's wedding, Sam asked to speak to her alone. He told her how sorry he was, how much he had failed to see her, failed to know her. And she came back to him. You could say that he departure jumpstarted his heart. And he learned to love for real.

When the disciples finally recognize Jesus, he disappears. But they remember how their hearts burned within them as he walked with them, how their hearts burned as he opened the Scripture to them.

Their hearts burned.

Every Sunday, we read the following prayer at the beginning of our worship…

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts…

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts…

It is as if we are asking God to clean our hearts, to make them a blank slate so that we are open to the newness of love and the ever changing revelation of God and of the ones we love.

If we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, we must learn to listen to God. We must realize that God is going to do a new thing with us every day, that God’s love will live and grow within us. If we are to love God, then we must learn to love one another with the same kind of open devotion, realizing that the people we love are not stagnant creatures which can be defined but rather magnificent creatures who are ever changing and growing, who must be seen and heard each day anew, as if they were never known to us before.

The Story of Peter

2011-05-02T11:14:00.003-04:00

What happened to Peter? Peter, my favorite disciple, went from being the one who always put his foot in his mouth to preaching an incredible sermon about Jesus in front of a huge crowd. What happened to Peter?

I know that Peter loved Jesus. We know that for so many reasons. He gave up his job fishing, left his nets and his boat and followed Jesus. For a fisherman, your nets and your boat were your ticket to life. Lose them and you lose your ability to eat. So when Peter and Andrew, the two brothers, left their nets, they left their lives.

Peter was married. How do we know this? Because he asks Jesus to come and heal his mother-in-law. So not only did Peter leave his nets, he left behind a family. We do not know if his wife accompanied him on his travels with Jesus nor do we know if he had any children.

Though Peter was the one who identified Jesus as the Messiah, the son of God, he was also the one who put his foot in his mouth on the Mountain of the Transfiguration and wanted to try to stage God and the prophets by building them little huts to dwell in. Peter was the guy who could not walk on water because he was afraid. Peter argued with Jesus about his crucifixion and it was hard for him to allow Jesus to wash is feet at the Last Supper. He is constantly arguing, complaining and generally getting things wrong. I think that is why I am so fond of him, because Peter is you and Peter is me. Peter represents all of us bumblers who always say the wrong thing when God enters our lives.

And of course, worst of all, Peter betrays Jesus. He tells a blatant lie, not once, but three times. He claims that he does not even know Jesus as Jesus is being interrogated and tortured. And when it comes to the cross, Peter is nowhere to be found.

He is a mess. He is a failure. But Peter does do one thing right, and it is the most important thing of all.

Peter allows God to forgive him.

After the crucifixion, Judas kills himself. Peter does not. Peter believes in the love that Jesus has for him, despite his betrayal, despite all his faults. Peter does not run away. Peter stays put.

And when Jesus appears in the Upper Room with Peter and all the disciples, except Judas, Jesus says some really important things.

The first thing that Jesus gives Peter and the others is peace. Jesus says Peace be with you.

Have you ever wondered why we say that in the liturgy, right before communion? We say it because Jesus said it to the disciples. It is a sign of the presence of the Risen Christ. It is a new way of being together, when we allow one another to make mistakes and we forgive.

And then Jesus says something else equally important. He says

As my Father has sent me, so I send you.

Jesus sends out the disciples to do God’s work. These are the same guys who just bailed on him, the same ones who always had questions and doubts and never seemed to know what was going on. Jesus sends out Matthew and James and John. Jesus sends out Peter.

And the next thing we know, Peter is preaching and healing and people are following him. THOUSANDS of people are following him.

What happened to Peter between the cross and the resurrection? Did he have a brain transplant? Did he simply become another, more confident human being? No, it is very important to note that Peter was the same guy. Only one thing changed about Peter, he was forgiven. And after he was forgiven, Peter just stopped being about himself. He truly gave his life to God.

When it comes to doing ministry, many people feel that they just don’t have it together. How can I teach when I don’t know everything? How can I counsel when I myself am such a mess? How can I feed people when I can’t always pay my bills? The answer is simple. Just let yourself be sent.

Jesus sent out the bumblers. He sent out the ones who did not have all the answers. He sends you and he sends me. He does not wait for us to get our acts together. If God waited for us to be perfect before we could serve, well, there would be very little ministry going on in the world.

Instead, God sent Mother Theresa, a little nun from Eastern Europe. And she ministered to the world, lifting AIDS patients from the gutters and giving them a place to be cared for, a place to die, and all the while she was wondering if God is even there. She never got her act together. She never stopped doubting. She was never sure. But she just did it anyway. She lifted up the world anyway. Why? Because God sent her.

And God sent us Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from such clinical depression that there were times that he could hardly function. But he led our country in one of our most desperate days, in a day when we were not sure if we could even be a united country. Lincoln never knew for certain if he was doing the right thing. He was never certain, but he served anyway. Why did he do all this? Because he was sent. Because he was there and the country needed him. Because God asked him.

God sends faulty, difficult, bumbling people. God sends people who doubt and people who despair.

Just as the Father sent me, so I send you, Jesus says, as he looks on their weary faces. I send you.

And we want to say, “Wait! Can’t you see that I am not ready? Can’t you see that I can hardly get my own life together? Can’t you see that my house is a mess and my marriage is a struggle? Can’t you see that I yell sometimes and blame others for my own mistakes? Can’t you see that my insecurities interfere with my life? Can’t you see that I am a mess? Can’t you see that, God?

But God sends us anyway, faults and all.

To be saved by God is not enough. To have faith is not enough, you must also serve. Once you believe in the resurrection, you have no choice but to follow. Once you believe, then Jesus is right there, smiling at you, sending you out into the world to do God’s work. The story does not end with your salvation, it ends with your service.

The Acts of the Apostles is the book that is always read during the season of Easter. It is the book that tells the story of what happened to the disciples after Jesus was risen and how they became the church. But the Acts of the Apostles is a book that is meant to go on forever. It does not end at the close of the first century, it goes on for over two thousand years as each one of us rises from a life of self-absorption to a life of service. The Acts of the Apostles is our story. It is the story of the church, that bumbling mess of idiots who won’t give up and keep on trying to serve Christ in the world.

Do not wait to get your life together before you begin to serve God. Do not think that ministry is reserved only for the most faithful, the most moral, the most perfect of people. Remember that God sent Peter. God sent that self-centered, cowardly idiot. And it was only after Peter completely failed at everything that he forgot about himself and began thinking of others. It was only when he let go of trying to be first that he became truly great, a true disciple, a founder of the church

Being Found

2011-04-25T16:12:00.000-04:00

There was a little girl whose name was TANYA. It was a gorgeous autumn day and she was biking in her neighborhood. She loved racing down the sidewalks and watching the leaves fall, sometimes almost in her face. The air was crisp, the kind of chilliness that seems to wake you up and help you feel alive. She biked faster and faster! Faster and faster and faster! She was so fast, so free. It was beautiful. She felt like she was flying.

After awhile, she got tired. Her breath was coming in gasps. She had to slow down. And it was then that she looked around.

It hit her with a cold finality. She was lost.

So the little girl turned her bike around and began to peddle frantically in the direction in which she came, but nothing looked at all familiar. She got a pain in the pit of her stomach. The more she looked around, the more lost she felt. She began to cry. Soon she stopped her bike and just wailed.

A policeman was driving by with his windows down, enjoying the cool crisp air. He stopped his car. “Are you OK?” he asked. When she told him that she was lost, he volunteered to put her bike in the back of his car and drive her around until she found her way. “Well,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, “My mom told me not to talk to strangers but that policemen were OK. So you must be OK, right?” The policeman smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I am OK.”

So they got her bike into the car and she got to ride in the backseat. He told her to look out the window and see if she recognized anything. At first, she couldn’t see anything that looked familiar and that same feeling of panic in her belly came again. But then, she saw it. Her church. She saw the brown stone and the tall bell tower. “You can stop here!” she yelled. “That is my church! I know my way from here…”

“Are you sure that you don’t want me to drive you home?” he asked.

“No.” she said. “I know my way from here.”

When Jesus died, his friends were lost in the worst kind of way. They loved him and looked to him for guidance. They ran away as he was killed and it only got worse when they saw that someone had even stolen his body from the tomb. But there was one person who never left Jesus. She was not the one that you would have thought. She was a crazy woman, a woman who had been possessed by demons that made her act crazy. When Jesus was forced to carry the cross, she followed him. She alone is present at the cross in all four of the gospels. She alone is present at his tomb. Her name was Mary Magdalene.

Mary was totally lost but she did not leave Jesus’ side. Instead she just stayed with him and cried. That is how we see her this morning, she is weeping outside of his burial site. Just crying her eyes out because she feels so lost.

All of you have felt lost at some point in your lives. You wonder why it is that you were born or what it is that you are supposed to be doing with your life. Someone that you love has died or has left you alone. And all of a sudden, you are not sure why you are alive or what any of this is all about. You sit alone in darkness.

Many people try to pretend that they are not lost. They get busy or try to forget their pain. They fill themselves up with food or drinks or stuff to make themselves forget that they are lost. But Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who run away from being lost. Jesus does not show his resurrection to people who pretend that everything is OK. Jesus shows eternal life to Mary, to the one who stays still even when things are really bad, the person who tells the truth and admits that she is lost and alone and afraid. Jesus comes to us when we sit alone in the pit of despair, that is the best place for him to come.

What is eternal life? It is nothing that can be described or understood with our brains. No one has ever described it or evaluated it. It is very simple and yet impossible to understand. Resurrection is your compass. It means that you have been found by God. And you will never be left alone again.

Gil Ott was in Vietnam. He was high on drugs, anything that he could get his hands on, he took. He smoked and he drank. Anything to try to forget the fact that he was in hell. Anything to try and forget the fact that he was killing people that he didn’t even know. He was trying to escape his own mind and he had never been more alone.

It was the middle of the night and the Viet cong had them surrounded. Everyone was shooting madly into the darkness. Gil knew that he might die at any moment. He was firing all around himself, trying to kill them before they killed him. And then, all of a sudden, the firing stopped.

There was this silence. Incredible sllence. Beyond all words. Beyond all meaning. The sun had just begun to rise and it filtered through the leaves on the trees. And Gil was there.

The fighting resumed. It was just as crazy as before. Gil returned to hell, but something inside of him had shifted.

Three years after Vietnam ended, he was lost again. Lost in drugs and alcohol, not knowing who he was or why he was in so much pain, and he wandered into a Quaker meeting. “It was that silence,” he would later tell me. “It called to me. I wanted to experience it again. It found me.”

From the day that Gil wandered into a Quaker meeting, he began his search for that silence, that stillness. He found it in Scripture, in church, in Jesus. What he had found was resurrection.

By the time that I met Gil, he was in Seminary.

How does it go, that part of the great hymn Amazing Grace? I used to sing it in the nursing home and people who seemed almost dead would come alive and sing with me…

I once was lost but now I’m found. I was blind but now I see.

You do not need to be a great theologian to understand what happened when Jesus rose from the dead. All that you need to know is that he found you. He found you in the darkest place, in your death. He found you in your death and your despair. He found you weeping by his tomb and he called your name.

And you will never be alone again.

What is church to me? It is where I find my direction in life. It is my home. When I walk into this place, I can breathe more deeply. I can see more clearly.

Resurrection doesn’t just happen this morning. It happens whenever God finds you and lets you know that he is there. It happens whenever the eternal one touches our mortal lives. It happens in glimpses of beauty. It happens when you look at the person you love and your heart is full.

There is no where that you can go where Jesus has not been. Even in the worst most frightening places of your lives, he is there, waiting for you, saying your name, holding out his hand to you.

You are not lost, he says. You have been found. You have been found.

THE QUESTION: Is God punishing me?

2011-04-04T11:20:00.001-04:00

I call it THE QUESTION. I give it a title because I am asked THE QUESTION a lot, at least once a week. It comes in many forms, but it is always the same question. Whenever someone in the church falls ill or someone dies without warning, suddenly, the question is posed.

“Is God punishing me?”

There is a deep, primal part of the human being that believes that life should be easy and smooth. And when we suffer, be it from illness or job loss or tragedy, we always ask THE QUESTION. It stems from the belief that God punishes. It is an Old Testament notion. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew people believed that God punished, that God was disappointed and angry with humanity and that it was for this reason that we suffer.

The Old Testament understanding of God would lead us to believe that Japan had sinned in some way as a country and it was for this reason that the Japanese suffered such a massive natural disaster. Similarly, those with cancer would be said to be paying for the sins of our culture, which pollutes and profanes the earth. This reasoning is very easy to understand and quite natural to assume when something bad happens. It seems to make sense because suffering does not seem natura. It is just wrong, and there must be a reason for it. It must be a punishment for SOMETHING. But THE QUESTION was exactly what Jesus came to refute. Jesus came to show us that God does not punish us with suffering.

In the gospel of John, Jesus is walking along and he comes to a man who has been blind from birth. THE QUESTION is asked of Jesus.

“Rabbi,” his disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus’ words echo across the centuries. I want you to hear them. Let them sink into your hearts so you can pull them out when you doubt or question God’s love. Jesus says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned;

he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.

That means that suffering is not a punishment. It is an opportunity, an opportunity for God’s works to be revealed.

When you suffer, you can wonder about whether you are loved by God, or you can rise to see your suffering as a chance to manifest God’s love in the world.

Years ago, a woman in my parish became pregnant. She and her husband had two girls and at the age of 40, she became pregnant with a third daughter. But an amniocentesis revealed that the child had Down Syndrome and a hole in her heart. The woman’s marriage fell apart. So this 40-year-old woman, with two small girls, came to my office unsure of what to do.

“I am afraid that this little girl will die before her first birthday,” she said. “She will have no value in society…And what will I tell my daughters if she dies?”

We sat there together in silence. She cried. We prayed. We thought of what it would be like to give birth to a child who died before the age of one. We thought about what it would be like to give birth to a child who could never read or have a career, a normal job. And she asked THE QUESTION.

“Why has this happened to me? What did I do wrong?”

But then we began to think about this child as a gift. Yes, she might die. Yes, she would not be like other children. But what if her life was a gift? What if God was bringing her into the world so that his works might be revealed?

The woman decided to have this little girl and to try to raise her for as long as she lived. Her name is Savannah. She’s had to have three heart surgeries. But she survived. And that Christmas, I asked that Savannah play the role of the Christ child in the Christmas pageant. I don’t think that there was a dry eye in the place.

In her, God’s love is revealed.

When the blind man is given his sight, his life becomes much more complicated. Not only does he see color and shape, but he sees the cowardice of his parents who will not speak up for him and the crookedness of the Pharisees, who try to frame Jesus as a criminal. And the more that the blind man sees, the more he seems to realize that the world is broken. And the more he realizes that the world is broken, the more he wants to be near Jesus. Just when he is most alone, rejected by his parents and the Jewish leaders, Jesus comes back to him. “Do you believe in me?” Jesus asks. And the man says that he does believe.

Suffering produces a crisis in the human mind. It brings us to a crossroads. We have to choose. Will we despair and wallow in THE QUESTION or will we use the suffering as a chance for God’s works to be revealed in us?

What will you do? You can be assured that you will not escape this life without suffering. It is part of the brokenness of our world. How will you choose to respond? That is the true Question.

Do you know that it is not your body or your success that matters to God? God cares about only one thing, your heart. God makes that clear to us in the Old Testament passage for today…

The prophet Samuel is trying to find a king. God has left Saul and found another, and it is the job of the prophet to find this young man and anoint him as God’s chosen one, the true King of Israel. God tells Samuel to invite Jesse and his sons to a sacrifice. “I will choose a king from among Jesse’s sons,” God says.

So, one by one, the boys of Jesse parade before Samuel the prophet. And one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, Samuel rejects them. And Samuel begins to doubt. “Why isn’t Eliab, the oldest, the king?” he asks God, “He is big and strong and handsome.” But God answers with words that speak to the heart of our relationship with God. God says to Samuel,

The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

God does not see or value looks, how your body appears, how you present yourself, your career, your prospects. God sees inside. God sees the love that a person bears for others and that is how God knows who you are.

God’s perspective is totally different from ours. The core question that God will ask us when we come face to face upon our death will not be, “What have you accomplished?” It will be this question: How have you loved?

Suffering produces one of the greatest opportunities to love. Like Shannon Miller, the famous gymnast and a beloved member of this church who is undergoing chemotherapy. Did you see her on television recently? In an interview, she wanted to help all other women who suffer from cancer so she took off her wig, right there on the news. “Look at me,” she said. “Let my suffering be a gift to you. I am in pain but my heart is pure. Fight with me. Celebrate life with me.”

How do you love? That is The QUESTION. Not all this punishment stuff. We will never understand why suffering happens in our world. It is part of the fabric of our fallen world, that is all that the Scripture tells us. But God came to join us in suffering and to rise again. To love us even in the midst of the greatest pain that can be imagined. Jesus suffered on the cross and continued to love. Can you?

The Samaritan Woman

2011-03-28T11:28:00.002-04:00

I think of her as the Elizabeth Taylor of her time. Granted, she only had five husbands, not eight, but she must have had the same tenacity, the same resilience. To be a woman who had managed to marry that many times, and then to be living with another man who was not her husband…Well, let’s just say that this was not the normal course of events for most women in Biblical times. Most women were much too frightened to ever divorce, let alone convince another man to marry them. She must have been strong, but also deeply troubled. And lonely. She must have led a life of hopes dashed and dreams broken.

She must also have been strong because she goes out to the well at noon. During the height of the sun, most people stay inside. The sun is simply too bright, too scorching hot. She must have been really thirsty. Or maybe the man who she lived with ordered her to fetch the water. Whatever the reason, she came, carrying a large earthenware jug, to draw water at the well. No doubt her mind was consumed with the heat. She probably ignored the Jewish man sitting there by the well. All she wanted was water and the chance to get back under cover. And then he spoke.

“Get me some water.” Did she believe that she might be mistaken at first, that he must be talking to someone else? Men did not address women that they did not know. Jews did not address Samaritans. Ever since King Solomon’s death, when the Northern Kingdom split from the Southern Kingdom of Judea, the Samaritans of the North and the Jews of the South did not speak. They did not consider each other to be human or to be loved by God. So why was this Jewish man addressing her?

With the boldness and bravery of someone beyond her time, the Samaritan woman addresses Jesus right back. And she asks him a question. She gets right to the point.

“Why are you speaking to me, a woman of Samaria?”

What is it that you are thinking, talking to a woman, an enemy, a non-person? Her question is direct and speaks of the truth. Jesus was breaking all social codes. Why?

He does not answer directly, but tells her that if she knew who he was she would be asking him to draw water for her. This really gets her curious. Jesus tries to tell her that he has water that wells up to eternal life and that she would never have to be thirsty again. Though she does not understand him fully, she asks him for this water. And he tells her to get her husband.

She tells the truth again. “I have no husband,” she says.

Jesus confirms her truth and tells her that she has had five husbands and that the man with whom she lives is not her husband. And she is overwhelmed, not by his promise of living water, but by the fact that he knew all about her. She is blown away by Jesus for the simple fact that he knows her.

When the disciples arrive, they are stunned to find Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman. When she leaves, they beg him to eat, but he keeps talking about the food of eternal life and they cannot grasp his words. They keep thinking that maybe the woman fed him. The woman goes to the village where she tells everyone what has happened to her. She was a woman who knew exactly who to tell and how to get news passed around quickly. The villagers listened to her, just as well all listened to Elizabeth Taylor when she told us to fight AIDS. The village listened when she told them that she had met the Messiah. They trusted her enough to usher an invitation. As a result, Jesus is invited to spend the night in Samaria in the homes of the sworn enemies of his people. And he accepts. In fact, he stays two nights. And the people of the village believe that he is the Messiah.

The story of the Samaritan woman is one of the longest stories in the gospels. The conversation that Jesus has with this woman is one of the longest conversations that he has with any one person in the gospels. And yet, she is not someone who you would expect to model the Christian life or become a great evangelist. She is by all accounts a moral failure and an outcast on many levels. Why did Jesus choose her?

In many Christian denominations today, the divorced are looked upon as people who have failed, who have broken the covenant of marriage. And certainly numerous divorces equal numerous failures. In the Roman Catholic tradition, divorced people are not allowed to receive communion. In many denominations, someone who is divorced cannot be ordained a pastor or priest. And yet Jesus chose to reveal his true nature to a woman who was on her sixth man. Why did he choose her? Or was it that she chose him?

I believe that Jesus saw in her not what she had done but what she could become. He saw the makings of a great evangelist, someone who would naturally tell others about him. He saw someone who was searching for the truth in a very broken world. He saw a person of hope and character. He saw far more of her than she could see of herself. And he marked her as his own forever.

I went to the beach this week on spring break with my kids. Like always, I tried on my bathing suit in front of the mirror. JD walked in and suggested that I go off looking in the mirror for Lent. What a good idea, I thought. How much time do I waste wishing that I could look like Kate Middleton or Nicole Kidman? Sometimes I think that women can’t even see themselves clearly anyway, we are so critical of our bodies. I should hang an icon in my bathroom instead and look at that. Or at least put a quote from the Psalms above my mirror, the one from Psalm 139 that reads, I knit you together in your mother’s womb…you are wonderful and marvelously made.

When Christ looks at you, he does not see what you see in the mirror. He does not see the wrinkles or the sagging thighs. He does not see fat or thin or ugly or beautiful. He does not see your past or define you by your race or ethnicity. Jesus sees with the eyes of God. Don’t you know what God sees?

I believe that God sees not what we have been or what we look like now, but God sees all that we can become. God sees all that we could be in a flash, beyond time. Our very best selves. God sees the very fullness of who we can be.

Do you remember what the parents and godparents of a child vow at a baptism? The Celebrant asks Will you, by your prayers and witness, help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ? And they answer We will.

I believe that God already knows who that child can become, what the fullness of Christ might look like for that precious human soul.

Both Luke and Jacob, my two older sons, have had growth spurts this year. We have marks on a wall in our kitchen where we record their growth. I am watching as their faces emerge from boyhood and it is like watching someone become the person that God always intended for them to be. When they were babies, they were just a fraction of themselves. But from the moment they were born, God knew what they would become. I am just watching, trying to catch up. It is like their faces are revealed gradually to me every day, just a little bit more.

When Jesus looked on that woman, he saw something more than anyone else could see. He saw more than her history of divorces, her strong will or her propensity to gossip. He saw a woman of courage and of truth. He saw someone who had the potential to really grasp who he was and to share that with others. Maybe it was her misfortune that made her able to see him as the Son of God. Maybe it was her brokenness that made her capable of being saved.

I think that we are going about it all wrong when we claim to know who God would accept and who God would reject. We cannot see what God sees. We cannot know the depths and the strength of those who seem to have lost everything. How can we judge one another? We cannot even seem to see our own selves clearly.

Now we see in a glass dimly, St. Paul once wrote. Then we will see face to face. Then I will know even as I am fully known.

It is not just God who is unknown to us. It is not just God who is a great and powerful mystery. It is us. We do not understand ourselves. We do not know all that we can be, all that God hopes and dreams for us to become. God wants us to grow into the full stature of Christ.

When the world tears you down, do not believe it. They do not know you. Only God can see who you really are.

Amen.

The Devil

2011-03-14T11:36:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, we had a tragedy in my family. My son Jacob’s beloved gecko died. Now you may think that this sounds like a small deal, but it was not. Jacob is ten years old and he loved that little African fat tailed gecko, his name was Sunshine. And when Sunshine’s light went out, when his tail got thin and he would no longer eat, there was real despair in our house.

The afternoon that the gecko died, Jacob stood with the tiny creature in his hands, and Max, my six-year-old, tears pouring down his face, said, “Oh, why did Adam have to eat the apple?”

Sometimes, I want to say the same thing: Oh, why did Adam and Eve have to listen to that snake?

Where did that snake come from? He was somewhere in Eden, waiting. Waiting to disrupt perfection and separate us from God. He was somewhere amidst the creation that God made. We are not told how he came to be. And all that snake does is introduce a thought, an idea: disobedience. He simply poses a quesetion:

What would it be like to disobey God? What if it made you like God?

That snake introduced a bad idea. Whenever we try to be like God, it ends in a mess. What were we thinking?

So Eve eats and Adam eats.

And my heart breaks when I remember the very first thing that God said to them after the fall. God says,
Where are you?

Because from that moment on, we were estranged. We were separated. And from that moment on, we entered a battlefield. It may sound strange to you, coming from an Episcopal priest, but I do believe in the battle between good and evil. And I believe that it is waged right here, in Jacksonville, Florida.

I sat with a business man about three weeks ago at the River Club. We ate lunch and looked out over the city of Jacksonville. Why are things so broken? He asked. And I thought of the children who can’t receive a decent education and the people who are homeless and the soldiers who may be giving up their lives in Afganistan. “I guess that we just wanted to do things our way and not God’s way and that’s when the mess began,” I said.

The story of Adam and Eve tells us a deep truth about who we are. But it is not just about us trying to do things our way. It’s also about something else. Something other than you and me and God. There is another party involved in our lives at times. There is another force. It is about the Adversary.

It may sound strange to you, especially coming from an Episcopal priest, but I believe in the devil.

This one goes by different names in Scripture: demon, devil, Satan (which just means Adversary or the one who opposes), the one who actively pulls us from God’s presence.

The Church in this century has done a poor job of discussing the Adversary. We either scare people to death with horror movies that depict incredible gruesome gore or we write Satan off as a medieval notion, a red man with horns and a tail. No educated person could swallow such a caricature. So we ignore his existence.

When you ignore the existence of the Adversary, you end up blaming humanity for the state of the world. We are just rotten people, or broken people. But sometimes this is just not adequate. Sometimes there is no denying a force that pulls us away from the good.

I think that is why we are so attracted to movies and stories where the good battles clear evil. It speaks a truth to us, though in our world the Adversary is always cloaked and longs to remain hidden.

All of these thoughts that you and I have: these worries, these crazy obsessive thoughts, they do not come from just you. Do not blame yourself for them. They are temptations and they come from a source outside yourself. There is something else that pulls you from God. There is truly a tug of war going on in your mind.

Jesus came to show us the way back to God. He meant for us to follow him. And the first thing that Jesus did, after his baptism, before he did any ministry at all, the very first thing he did was to get to know his own mind. The first thing that he did was to bring out the devil in broad daylight. He let the tempter speak to him and he listened. And then he said no.

Jesus went out in the desert to meet the tempter face to face. He met that ancient snake, that being that opposes the will of God. Jesus knew that out in the desert, with nothing to distract him, he was bound to hear the voice of something other than God, the voice of the tempter.

The tempter is usually hidden to us, but he was not hidden to Jesus. Jesus was so sure about who he was and how he was loved by God that the only way the tempter could appear was to just appear in plain sight and to openly ask the questions.

Jesus was so pure, so clean of heart, that he fasted and prayed for forty days before the tempter would come out and challenge him. But finally, the tempter arrived and tested Jesus in three ways: He challenged Jesus to feed himself, relying on his own self and not God. He asked Jesus to test God by trying to kill himself. And he asked Jesus to worship Him. To all of these temptations, Jesus said a clear and definitive No.

The tempter will also come to you in three fundamental ways. Firstly, the tempter will say, “Let your life be about you and only you. Help yourself! You poor thing! Save yourself! Hold onto your money!” That is a primary way the tempter separates us from God, by getting us absolutely absorbed in ourselves. I once knew a woman who lived in a kind of hell. She lived alone, never having a successful relationship because she was never treated perfectly. Everyone hurt her or betrayed her. She went from one church to another with people disappointing her left and right and she never could admit to being wrong. She had not a friend in the world but still, she was right and she was unfortunate. She lived in hell, but she was right! And the tempter was happy with her.

The second way the tempter works is to get you to despair. Throw yourself down from this height, he says to Jesus. Maybe God will send angels to rescue you. Or to us, he might say, “It is not worth it. Your life is a mess. You are a mess. No one loves you. You deserve to die.” I have seen this kind of temptation live most in an alcoholic who was drinking himself to death and did not care. I had to watch as he threw his life down and for what? Because he couldn’t say No to his temptation.

And lastly, the Devil loves to be worshipped. Serve your temptations, he says. Become obsessed with your vices, your addictions, your needs, your wants. Worship any and all things that separate you from God and you will become so wrapped up in all of it that you will forget who you really are. Worship your relationships. Worship your career. Spend all your time worrying about your weight or how much people like you. Agonize over your money. Serve these things rather than God and you are bowing down to the tempter. And you will spend years of your life running after things can cannot feed you and do not deserve your adoration. You will be like a hamster running on a wheel, running and running and getting nowhere. And the tempter loves every minute of it!

CS Lewis had to write about the devil in story form, because he knew that people would either laugh or they would become frightened were he to openly discuss the issue. So he wrote letters from the Devil’s apprentice to his nephew. He called this compilation of letters The Screwtape Letters. But these fictional letters made some brilliant points.

Let the man become obsessed with protecting his finances. Let him think that he just can’t get up in the morning to get to church. If he does make it to church, let him become annoyed with the loud voice of the woman in back of him who sings off-key. Distract him by getting him worried about his appearance, anything to turn his mind from the gifts that God is offering to him in the Holy Eucharist. Anything.

There is a war going on in your minds. It is not just about you being lazy or a worry wart. There is such a thing as an outside force that enters your mind and pulls you from God. You cannot make that tempter go away, but you can say no to him, just as Jesus did.

Lent is a time in which we dare that tempter. We challenge that one by refraining from something that we love, or doing something extra for God and when the temptation arises and we think “oh, I should just take one piece of cake, after all it’s a party!” Or maybe you wish you had changed your fast to fasting from beets instead, when the doubts and temptations arise, you can see them for what they are- attempts to get you derailed. And you can say no. I am staying the course.

People are not born bad. No baby is evil. People who become evil become so because they have let that temptation carry them into an abyss. Don’t listen to it! Just because you have violent thoughts to selfish thoughts or inclinations does not mean that you are evil. Even Jesus had temptations. You are good and you were made for God. But there is another force at work that is actively seeking to pull you from all that God created you to be. To admit this fact, the truth of the existence of evil, is to admit that there is an enormous battle going on for your soul. And you are the greatest warrior in that battle. And God has given you the tools to succeed.

And when God calls to you and says, “Where are you?”

Turn back from your worries and obsessions and say to God, “Here I am. I am still here.”

About Him

2011-03-07T10:51:00.003-05:00

When Jesus went to pray, he usually went alone. He would walk off by himself. “I am going up the mountain to pray,” is all that he would say. And off he went. What happened up there between Jesus and God was a mystery, and no doubt the disciples wondered. Jesus did not seem to feel guilt or the complicated emotions that come with trying to please people, he just did what God asked him to do. And God wanted to be alone with the Son, a lot.

So it must have been a shock when Jesus asked three disciples to accompany him up the mountain. “Peter,” he said, “James. John.” “I want you to come up the mountain with me.”

What an incredible privilege, to go with Jesus to pray. They must have felt as if they had been invited into the in group. This was it. They were going with Jesus into his inner world. He must truly trust them. It must have been like when a friend finally invites you into their home for a meal but even more intimate. This was Jesus’ inner sanctum.

The Scripture tells us that Mt. Tabor was the mountain. And Mt. Tabor is no joke. It’s not Mt. Everest by any means but it would take at least four or five hours to walk to the top. My husband and I drove a tiny white rental car up Mount Tabor years ago and it took awhile. I wondered if our car would make it. Walking with Jesus on foot would have been a true hike.

Why was it that God chose mountains? Moses was instructed by God to climb a Mountain as well. Mt. Sinai, and there God revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Moses too had a face that shone so brightly that no one could look at him. And Elijah, he found God on a mountain. Was it the mountain air? The High altitude? Was it partially because the ancients believed that heaven was up and hell was down? Was it just that mountains are hard to climb and it is easy to be alone there? For whatever the reason, Jesus met God on the mountain, just like the prophets did before him. He encountered God in a place that was not easy to get to. And when Jesus came into direct contact with God, his appearance changed.

In many of the world religions, those who encounter God directly always are painted with light shining from their face. They seem to glow. Travel the world and you will see pictures of Krishna in Hinduism, The Buddha, Moses and Elijah and others with light that emanates from their heads. Some call it a halo, some have no words for it.

What happened to Jesus made a halo look like small potatoes. He became light itself. The Gospel of Matthew says that he becomes dazzling, blinding. The disciples found it hard to look at him. And the brightest part was his face. He radiated light.

When Moses was on the mountain, and he asked to see God, God told him that he could not look, but he could look at God’s backside, or the ancient Hebrew really means at the place where God “just was.” And when Moses came down the mountain, his face seemed to shine with light.

Einstein based his entire theory of Relativity on light, as if the Universe hinged on the stuff. So it does not come as a surprise to me that God would show up as light. After all, it was the first created thing. God separated the light from the darkness. God is the opposite of nothing, the opposite of darkness. God is light.

I have no doubt that those who are close to God glow. I have seen it. Even my friend Marcella, when she went on a silent retreat to meditate all day, seemed to have light shining from her eyes when she came home. When I visit the sick or dying, you can see light shining from the eyes of those who love God. It is just so obvious. God seems to have some kind of residual effect and those who encounter God shine.

Moses and Elijah also showed up. I know how strange that must sound. Two dead guys appear. They were standing all around smiling like they are at some kind of family reunion.

I believe that true communion with God involves communion with those who we love who have died. That is why we call it communion. It is a gathering of all who we love. Everybody is there. God simply embraces them all. The Church calls this the communion of saints. To have a love affair with God is to see God in the people you love and the people you love become part of God. Those who we love return to us within the heart of God. So Moses and Elijah, who lived in God, came to visit Jesus, to stand with him in his ministry.

All this light and communion of saints was so beautiful that Peter freaks out. And how does he respond? He gets busy. Just like us. Peter decides he needs to package this moment, to hold onto it. He decides to plan out a few homes to let the saints reside there for a bit. “Don’t move,” he says. “I want you all to stay just this way and I will make houses for each of you and we can just stay here, right here. Let’s just freeze the moment.” I can just hear Peter’s plans in his mind. Size, shape, dimension, how long they will take to make, the kind of materials he will need. He gets so involved with his idea, so distracted, that God has to interrupt.

God speaks. “This is my Son! Listen to Him!”

Peter and James and John fall on their knees. They are scared. Terrified. It was not the picture of Jesus standing their blinding them, nor was it the appearance of the prophets that terrified them, it was God’s words that scared them. God spoke and Peter was afraid.

Why was he afraid? Why do all of us get scared when we come close to encountering God? Why do we say we want to grow closer to God but then run if God gets too close? What is it that we are so afraid of?

I think that, at that very moment, when heaven met earth, Peter was scared because he realized a fundamental truth. Peter realized that his life was not about him. He realized that although he, Peter, was loved, he was not the center of the Universe. He realized that it was time for his life to be about someone else.

In each of our lives, we have one fundamental choice that we are asked to make. Is your life going to be about YOU or is it going to be about God? We are asked this question over and over and over again. Who is going to be the center of your Universe?

When you pray, many of us talk. We send up lists to God of the sick and the grieving, of our own needs and those of others. But God told Peter to listen. God told Peter that it was not his agenda that was important. Peter did not know what was best. He was not capable of planning what to do in that moment. His attempt at trying to orchestrate the transfiguration fell flat, just like your attempt to orchestrate your life will fall flat. You are not designed to direct and rule your life. Only God can do that.

“This is my Son,” God says. “The Beloved. Listen to Him!”

In other words, it is not about you, Peter or you, John or me or Sally or my elderly aunt Sherry. It is not even about you when you are sick or suffering, when you are struggling to raise a child or figure out what you are supposed to do with your life. It is not about You. It is about Him. And your life will not work, it will not even come close to working, until you get that straight.

Our job is not to plan or manage or orchestrate. It is to listen. It is to listen.

Maybe that’s why Jesus took them up the mountain. So that they could look down and see how vast and beautiful it was below. So that they, for just a moment, could realize that they did not see everything clearly. Does a child make its own decisions about what to eat and when to sleep? No, the parents decide all that and the child must listen. And we too, as children of God, we must listen to the God who made us and knows who we truly are.

It took Peter until after his betrayal to realize that his life was about Jesus and not about himself. And when he finally handed his life over to God, that is when he became powerful. That is when the church began.

Letting your life be about God is truly scary. It terrifies me. It terrified Peter. But it’s the only way to be.

Just be still and listen.

Perspective

2011-02-21T14:03:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I think that Jesus is just plain unreasonable.

Love your enemies, he tells us. Pray for those who persecute you. When someone slaps you, turn and offer your other cheek.

Love the IRS man? Love the guy who cuts you off on the highway and doesn’t seem to care at all but speeds on past with loud music playing? Love the lady at the bank who puts you on perma-hold with terrible musac playing and can’t seem to answer a simple question? Love the health insurance executive who refuses to cover a surgery because of a pre-existing condition? Love the bully who makes your child suffer at school?

This is so hard to do that I often don’t even mention it. When a young woman came to me years ago to tell me that her uncle raped her repeatedly I did not say that she was supposed to love him. How could I have done that? All I could do was listen and assure her that God still loved her, even when she cut herself and wanted to die. All I could do was hear her pain. And when she finally got mad at the man who hurt her so badly, I was grateful. Get Mad! I felt like saying. It’s when a victim appears depressed instead of angry that I really begin to worry. Isn’t it RIGHT and JUST to be angry at someone who hurts you?

Who is Jesus kidding? How in the WORLD can we love our enemies?

What about the President of Iran who hates everything American or the men who flew planes into skyscrapers? Or the man in the city of Kansas where I came from who routinely murdered women and men for a decade in their homes? What about them? What could it possibly mean to love them?

Jesus couldn’t have meant what he was saying. Or could he?

Just when I think that he must have been asking too much, asking what no human being could possibly do, the image of Jesus hanging on the cross comes to me and I remember his words…They came out during the height of his pain, not after years of therapy or processing. Right when he was experiencing pain beyond anything that we can imagine, he said,

Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.

When I remember these words, I begin to believe, once more, that Jesus knew exactly what he was talking about when he told us to love our enemies. And that God knows we can do it.

So what was it that Jesus had that we don’t have? (I mean, other than the fact that he was GOD!) What was he able to do on that cross that we cannot seem to do? How could he love so much and so unconditionally?

And then it came to me. It has to do with perspective. It’s all about perspective.

If you and I were to believe in the Resurrection without hesitation, if we were to really trust that there is NOTHING that can separate us from the love of God and that our souls are destined to live with Christ in a life which far exceeds this one, well, if this is the case, then everything changes.

The reason that we hate or run away or abhor or want to destroy is because we are afraid. We are afraid of what has happened to us, that it has ruined us. We are afraid that we will never be the same.

But if you knew that NO ONE could separate you from God’s love, and that even if they killed your body, that you yourself would be fine, better than fine, then everything would change. You could stop worrying about yourself. And you can begin to think of the soul of the other. You can begin to see that other person as human, even if all that appears before you is evil. You can treat that person as if there is something still buried inside that can be redeemed. Some sliver of the light of Christ just might be still dimly lit in even the worst human being. It might be there. And it is your job to honor that possibility.

Deacon Ben Clance stood before a cell for 30 minutes waiting for the gaurds to open the door this past week. They kept having other things to do, inventory, people to count. “What do you want to see HIM for?” they asked. Ben just stood waiting, because he had promised the man in solitary that he would bring him communion. He promised a murderer and he planned on keeping his promise.

I met with the new Imam at the Muslim Center here in Jacksonville. He is American but studied Islam in Saudi Arabia. We met with other religious leaders to see if there is anything, anything that we can communicate about. The Imam told me a story that I had not heard about in the news.

During the height of the riots in Egypt, on a day when the military had fired on the crowds and many had been killed or wounded, it was evening. The Muslims in the crowd heard the call from the mosque indicating that it was one of the five times a day that they were instructed to roll out their prayer mats and kneel, bowing towards Mecca and chanting the Koran. So the Muslims began to say their prayers. They put away their sticks and rocks and began to prostrate themselves towards Mecca. Some had prayer rugs and some did not. As the soldiers advanced, the Coptic Christians saw them from afar, and the Christians joined hands and formed a circle around the Muslims, using their bodies as shields against the oncoming soldiers.

They used their bodies as shields.

Do you really believe that everything will be OK? Do you trust that God has a place for you, a life for you that is everything that you have ever wanted and more? Do you believe this?

If you do, then you can love your enemies. You can begin to see them for who they are and even risk your life for them. But if you do not trust in the resurrection of our Lord, then how can you be expected to love those who mistreat you?

And let me be clear that by love, I do not mean that you should LIKE them or have WARM feelings for them. That may never happen and it is far beyond your control. What I mean is that when you are mistreated, that you do not retaliate, that you give the perpetrator kind and respectful treatment even in the face of their hatred. That you treat them with kindness, compassion, honesty. And you do this for GOD and for the very salvation of your soul.

Because in the end, you are not concerned about your car, or your taxes or even about your body. You want to come to God and God is love and that is all that motivates you. You want to see the face of God.

I woke up very early yesterday morning and saw the moon shining on my face. It was a full moon and beautiful. And I knew that it was shining on all of us, the homeless and the man who was wandering the streets drunk, the exhausted young mother and the man who beat his wife, man who stole and the murderer. That moon shone its light on all of us and in its light I was reminded that God invites all of us to the table. God wants all of us to come inside.

It is all about seeing things from God’s perspective.
From God’s perspective, we all fall short and we all deserve another chance again and again and again. From God’s perspective, life is short and it is a training ground for the life eternal. From God’s perspective, suffering is an opportunity to show forth the love and strength of Christ. And every time you love your enemies, God’s light shines through you.

So when that guy cuts you off or the lady at the bank won’t help you or when, God forbid, you get hurt or robbed or your children get hurt, remember that God’s light shines on all of us and that this is not the end of the story. This moment is by no means the last word. Remember that through the Resurrection, you have the power to pray for, to forgive, and yes, even to love those who would do evil to you.

Salt

2011-02-07T14:01:00.001-05:00

"You are the salt of the earth..."
Jesus

The images on television are frightening. Riots occurring in the streets. Video cameras and cell phones capture everything, the bloodied heads, the screams, a man beating another man with an iron bar. Fires and tanks in the streets. Egypt is erupting before our very eyes.

Our bishop received a letter from the Anglican bishop in Egypt. His name is Bishop Mouneer Anis. He thanked the churches of America for our concern. He said that he feels that the Lord is very present with them in this time. And thus far, none of the churches in Cairo have been destroyed.

The Bishop's letter was a great example of Anglicanism. He expresses the complexity of the situation in Egypt and he talks about prayer. He writes about the fact that both Christians and Muslims are taking to the streets to protect buildings, but the Bishop is afraid that the escalation of violence will lead to radical Islamic groups taking over. It is a time of fear for them and they are praying for a peaceful transition. He writes of how the Christians are gathering in the churches and, when they pray, a sense of God's presence and of peace overcomes them.

His letter is thought-provoking. It tells of a rare branch of Christianity called Anglicanism that embraces faith in Jesus Christ and also teaches that the same God who brought Jesus to us also gave us minds to think. The Bishop invites us to bring our thoughts and questions and struggles to Jesus. Don’t check your brain at the door. Bishop Anis speaks of young Muslims who are protecting the churches in the streets and other more radical Muslims who are escalating the violence. He lives in the ambiguity and uncertainty of the moment, without all the answers. He lives the questions.

We are entering an age of rising fundamentalism world-wide. Due in large part to the development of technology and the internet, our world is changing rapidly. Alongside this rapid change, there are those who would clamp down and hold their religious beliefs like they are weapons, demanding that God would have them convert everyone or kill them. This is a day of radical extremes. Few religious bodies embrace the Mystery of God the way that we do. Few religious bodies have the courage to admit that they do not have all the answers. The Anglican church is vital today, more vital than ever.

I like to call us the unfundamentalist church. We embrace the Mystery of God. We know that Jesus is our Lord, but we do not claim to understand God in all of the Divine majesty. We are a people who remain faithful in the midst of all this change, admitting that we do not have all the answers, but trusting the God will guide us. In this day of fast production and easy answers, we are a voice of patience and prayer, reminding the world that God is much bigger than we are. And that there is much that we do not know about God.

My friend Sue is a long-time Southern girl. She loves grits. She would eat them morning, noon and night if need be. And, as a Southerner, she knows how to cook grits.

You have to put the salt in the grits when you are cooking them. If you add the salt later, as an after-thought at the dinner table, it does not taste as good. There is a world of difference. You must put the salt in the mix as the grits are cooking. There is no other option for true, Southern grits.

Sue has been to those restaurants where they tell you that their grits are heart-healthy. They cook with little or no salt. And the grits taste like cardboard. They are dead tasting. They aren’t even in the same vicinity as real Southern grits.

Jesus talks about salt this morning. He uses the most common, familiar things to teach us about our relationship with God. And what he says is rich. It is rich.

Jesus says that we are salt. We are the stuff that brings out the flavor in this world. We are an essential ingredient in the grits of God’s creation. Without us, the world just doesn’t taste right.

Salt is incredibly valuable. You know the phrase, he’s worth his salt. Where do you think that comes from? In the age before refrigeration, salt was what kept meat from going bad. Salt was essential for life. Salt was incredibly valuable in Jesus’ time, just as you are incredibly valuable.

Salt is also curative. People with sore throats need to gargle salt. You all know that swimming in the salt water of the sea has great results. Cuts and scrapes heal faster.

Salt has always been with us and we cannot imagine our world without it. We all have salt shakers on the table at home. Those little salt shakers are useless unless they are mixed in with our food. They are nothing if they just stand alone. And when they hit the food they seem to disappear, but they make all the difference in the world.

We cannot live without salt. It is a vital part of our bodies. When we get dehydrated, we don’t just need water, we need to replenish our salt. It is an essential ingredient of life.

I find that Episcopalians are shy about their faith. They are reticent to offend, or to explain that their Dean is a woman and they can have a beer. When people ask them if they go to church, they will say yes, but, on the whole, they will not shout about it for fear of offending. And I say, that has to end.

The world has a need for the unfundamentalist church. We love God and embrace the mystery that is God’s creation. We freely admit that we do not have all the answers but that Jesus gave us everything that we need to know. We must stand up and be the salt that God calls us to be. God needs us to show the world that you can be radically faithful while not being radically violent. That you can respect the dignity of every human being, love God and embrace the Mystery of God-all at the same time.

We are Christians. We are Anglicans. We are Episcopalians.

I know, the word Episcopalian is too long, too academic, too unwieldy. It’s almost like we knew that we wanted to stump the listener from the beginning. Our title almost says, I’m too smart for you. I have a name that you are going to need to spell, a name that you will not remember how to pronounce. Anglicans living in The United States came up with this name during the Revolution, because we were patriots and did not want to be known as the Church of England. So we are Episcopalians and we are Anglicans. It is complicated. I can't tell you how many times I am asked to spell the word Episcopalian. But live with it. It is who we are.

This coming Tuesday morning, we will do something that is very Anglican. It is like salt for this city, light for us to see by. We will be hosting the second Leadership Breakfast here at the Cathedral. It is on the subject of education here in Jacksonville. We all know that with 40% of the children of this city not graduating from high school that we have a problem. The head of the KIP school will be with us. Tracey Tousey will be with us. And the superintendent of schools just called. He wants to be on the panel too.

We will be openly talking about why things aren’t working. And exploring if there may be some kind of answers out there for us all, for our children.

I think about our brothers and sisters in Egypt, praying and trying to stop the violence. I think about us here, trying to initiate a dialogue about the state of our children, and I am proud to be Anglican. I am proud to be Episcopalian. I want to be the salt that gets in the mix before the dish is done, when I can make the most difference, even if I get burned and broken in the process.

Yes, things are sometimes a mess in the Episcopal Church. Mess comes naturally when you allow people to think for themselves. You see, people who think for themselves are bound to disagree. But getting in the mix is all that Jesus asks us to do.

You are the salt of the earth, he says. Just get in the mix.

The world is rapidly changing. Radical Fundamentalism is on the rise.

Don’t be afraid to stand up and be who you are.

The Myth about Feeling Good

2011-01-31T10:16:00.002-05:00

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled.

In the movie, Castaway, Tom Hanks is a FedEx Executive who is in love. His fiancé is getting her PhD. She is bright, energetic and honest. Tom is busy as a Corporate Exec for this booming new business that transports packages at rapid speed all over the world. He frequently travels, eats a little too much, enjoys his life and feels content in every way.

Tom is about to leave for a trip on a FedEx jet. His fiancé begs him not to go. She says that she has a bad feeling about it, that something might happen to him. He laughs her off, kisses her, and boards the plane which is charted to cross the Pacific Ocean.

Something happens on that place that night. There is a storm and some kind of malfunction. The plane goes down. The crew dies, some of them right in front of Tom’s eyes. He struggles to swim in dark waters and finds a flotation device. By the next morning, he awakens on an island. He is the sole survivor. The body of one of the crew members is there and some random FedEx packages are lying in the sand.

Tom begins to learn how to survive. He rapidly realizes that there is no one to help him. He unwraps the packages and makes the most of the contents: a pair of iceskates turn into knives, a volleyball becomes decorated and he even talks to it and befriends it. He finds a cave in which to sleep and he learns to fish. For four years, he lives on this island alone, staring at the small picture of his fiancé each night for comfort.

After four years of studying the seasons and the wind, some debris washes up on shore which includes material that could be used to make a sail. Tom builds a small raft and risks his life to find a ship or another shore. He is found by a vessel after days and days, when he is near death by dehydration, and he returns to life in America.

His fiancé, who thought he was dead, has now married another man. She has a daughter. She is no longer the person who he remembers, but she does tell him that she never believed that he was dead. And she tells him that she should have waited for him, instead she tried to replace him with another and her life became empty.

When she tried to fill the emptiness that he left by filling it with another man, it did not seem to work. And when he returned, there was no room in her life for the man who she loved most of all.

Jesus walked with us once. Becoming Christian means falling in love with him and wanting to see him, to remember him, to be blessed by him. It also means to realize that he is not with us bodily. Being Christian means that we miss him and want to see him. It means that we are empty. We are incomplete.

Americans have a simple goal in life. We want to be happy. And we believe that the highest goal in life is the happily ever after life. So we spend all our lives trying to be happy, trying to be fulfilled. And when we are not content, we feel that something is fundamentally wrong with us. We should be happier! So we exercise harder or read self-help books or take medications. This is the eternal myth-that you should be happy in this life.

So we begin the process of idolatry. Step back and think about the messages that bombard you on TV, on billboards, in magazines. If you eat this hamburger, you will be happy. If you go on this cruise, you will be happy. If you invest your money with this group, or lose this weight, or buy the right outfit, you will be happy. So we buy and eat and invest and go to the gym, but none of it makes us happy.

So we move to the second level of idolatry. We recognize that stuff will not fill us, so we aim for the perfect relationship. If only I had the perfect relationship, then I would be happy. Or maybe it’s the perfect job and we seek, where everyone gets along all the time. So we try for these things, but we can’t seem to establish the perfect relationship and our job is sometimes just a job.

So we move on to the final and most profound kind of idolatry. We start praying, serving God, worshipping in church. We do all these things faithfully, but we do not do them for God, we do them for ourselves, so that we will be happy.

The majority of the churches in this country promise that if you are faithful enough, you will find peace. You will be fulfilled, you will be happy. But here is the truth:

Jesus did not come to make you feel better. He came to save you.

God’s first priority is not that you feel good. God has much more important things in mind for you. And God knows that when you suffer, you grow. In fact, being happy in a world where there is such suffering is almost unrealistic. How can you be happy when people are starving, when riots break out in Egypt and no one can agree on how to solve the deficit? How can you be happy when your children struggle or your parents age before your eyes? Isn’t it realistic to wish that things could be easier, even for those of us who are incredibly fortunate? Is life really ever easy?

Jesus says that the point of life is not to be happy. The point of life is to realize that you are incomplete. You are poor, hungry, mourning and lost. You do not have everything that you need. The point of life is to realize that you cannot exist without God, that there is no complete without God, that you don’t want anything as much as you want God.

Blessed are the poor, he said. Blessed are you when people you love die and you grieve for them. Blessed are you when you hunger and thirst for the world to be a better place, for you will be filled.

Let yourself be empty. Let yourselves be restless. Let yourself yearn for something more than this. Long for God. Wait for God. Hope for God. Blessed are you when you wake up to realize that you are incomplete without God.

People who are poor have no illusions about their fragility. They do not believe that they are in control of their lives. They know that they are helpless, dependent, alone. And when they realize these things, then they are ready to enter into relationship with God.

So harbor no illusions, no matter what you own or who you love. Your life is brief. Your belongings are impermanent. Your love is a reflection of the greater love of God. As the Psalmist says, You are a breath that comes and goes away. You are not here to stay.

If you are restless or dissatisfied, you are BLESSED. Do not shame yourself for not being happy all the time! You are not doing something wrong. You are searching and that, in itself, is good. You are looking for Christ in a broken world. Sometimes you see him, but other times you see his absence and you long for his return.

When Tom Hank’s character realizes that his fiancé is gone, married to another man, he lays in his hotel room at night and switches the lights on and off to remind himself of the light in his cave on the island. Once more, he is lost. Once more, he is empty. The life that he longed for has slipped through his grasp. And he realizes that he has to start over again.

So the next day he leaves and drives out into the Midwest, leaving from Texas, out into the open plain. He does not know where he is going, only that his life has changed and he must change with it. And as with all those of us who are longing for something more, he looks ahead at the horizon and strains to see what is up ahead.

Hunger and thirst for righteousness, do not shame yourself for not being content. You were made for more than this. Much more.

Fishing

2011-01-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

Have you ever noticed that the passages of Scripture that we are most familiar with are the ones that we fail to examine? It is as if they become old friends to us, comfortable, predictable. We don’t want to disrupt the cozy relationship that we have established with these passages. We say, Oh, I know that passage! And we stop listening. Who wants to reexamine something when it feels so familiar, so comfortable? Who wants to disturb and old friend? So we gloss over the passage, smiling and nodding and failing to listen to the depths of God’s message contained in the sacred words.

Today’s gospel is one that many of you have heard. You know, the one about fishing for people? Jesus has just emerged from the desert. He walks along the shore of the Sea of Galiliee and sees two fishermen casting their nets into the sea. The nets of fishermen were made of rope tied in hundreds of knots. They were invaluable as tools in making a living, second only to the boats in their value. It was probably close to dusk for the fishermen tended to fish at night. The fish would not rise in the heat of the day, but preferred to take the bait in the cool hours of the night.

Jesus saw Peter and Andrew, two brothers, going about their daily lives. They were hauling the heavy net, and throwing it out like a weighty sheet into the water. Jesus said to them

Come. And I will make you fish for people.

These words were life-changing. With these words, Peter and Andrew left their entire livelihood behind and followed Jesus. But they sound so simple, so metaphorical.

Come. And I will make you fish for people.

Listen to these words with me. For their meaning is so rich, so deep as to penetrate our understanding of what it means to serve God. These are not familiar old words, or the words of a comforting fairy-tale. These words are the stuff of change itself. To catch a glimpse of what Jesus was talking about is frightening. It is frightening. And I will tell you why.

When I was five years old, I went fishing with my cousin Edward. Edward was eight years older than me and I thought that he knew everything. I was so proud that he had invited me. I was determined to learn a lot, to do everything he said, to be totally and utterly useful.

It took hours for Edward to catch a fish, or at least that’s what my five-year-old mind remembered. Hours of waiting. It seemed like forever. Then then, he hooked a fish.

A tug of war ensued between Edward and the fish. Edward won and he lifted the fish into the boat where it flailed and struggled. I watched it in horror.

It was unable to breathe, it’s gills pumping in and out. It seemed totally panicked, desperate to return to it’s world of water. I watched and watched. I was horrified by the agony of the fish. I had no idea that something so peaceful could be so brutal. I watched longer and, finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I threw that small fish back into the water. Edward was furious. I never went fishing with him again.

Most of us come to church because we are hungry for something. We want peace of mind. We want to understand why our lives aren’t working out quite like we planned. We want some guidance, something more meaningful than ordinary existence. Maybe we have a child and realize that we cannot raise that child by ourselves. How can we teach them about morality when we don’t really understand it ourselves? Or maybe we get sick and begin to wonder, “What does happen to me when I die, when my body no longer works?” We begin to hope that there might be something more and it is this hope that drives us here, to this beautiful space. We are hungry for something that we cannot articulate.

We come to this beautiful building, here this music that stirs our souls and some of us begin to get hooked. We find ourselves longing to return. We realize that our lives just don’t feel quite right when we miss church. We begin to recognize that there is something here which we cannot explain but which moves us deeply. We begin to believe, to be willing to put our trust in God. And that’s when the tug of war begins.

The early person of faith wants God to do his or her will. We want to be believers, we know that God made us and we want to serve God, but we are still convinced, somewhere deep inside, that we know what is best for us. We pray for things like health and prosperity, a balanced budget and safety for our children. We all do this. We pray for our will to be done. We ask God to help with our agenda and then we strain and tug against the pull of the fisherman. Do it my way, God, we say. Not your way, but my way.

At some point, we give up trying to tell God what to do and we begin to listen. We awaken to the fact that God wants to pull us out of our very existence, to a realm of being that is totally unfamiliar. God wants to pull us into what Jesus described as The Kingdom, a reality that it completely different from what we know. This kingdom is so unknown and so foreign to us that we struggle and we are afraid. We must die to ourselves so that we can be born to God.

To be truly caught, utterly and totally by God is to know that God really knows so much more that we know. It is to hand ourselves over to God, body and soul and to wonder what God will do next with us. It is to live in the Kingdom, in the resurrection life, and to make all our choices from that vantage-point. To be caught is to say, with sincerity and with hope, Thy Will be Done.

I just returned from a visit to Cuba. The Christians there are incredibly healthy spiritually. They have so little to hold onto in this world. There is so much poverty and so many economic issues in Cuba. The buildings are literally crumbling. Many would be considered hazardous in this country and would be condemned. Just going to church has been a great risk in years past. To become a priest is to give up a steady reliable salary for the uncertain hope of the generosity of a small struggling church.

But, despite all of this struggle for money and belongings, for a secure place to live, the people are so happy. They have light shining from their eyes.

At the Installation of the new Dean, I wanted to give them something, but my Spanish is terrible. So I sang an Irish blessing for them. They were so happy and gracious. They thanked me and kissed me and told me how wonderful it was, a silly, simple blessing that my mother used to sing to me. And at the Peace, every single person in the Cathedral had to hug every other person. The peace lasted for a full 15 minutes. These people had been caught by the fisherman.

An elderly woman approached me after church. She ran a house church for Episcopalians who could not get to the cathedral. She spent her meager pension on helping those less fortunate than herself. And she had light shining from her eyes.

It strikes me that there are many stages of fishing. There is the time when you are just getting hooked, a time of excitement and thrill as you realize the beauty and the hope that God provides for you. Then there is the tug of war, as we struggle to try to make God do what we want, what we think that it means to be Christian. And then there is the final stage, when you allow the fisherman to pull you right out of this world into the resurrection life, where your life is no longer your own and everything is new.

And even when you have been pulled into the Kingdom itself, and your life becomes dedicated to God, there are times when you flail around, not knowing how to give your life away, not knowing how to die to yourself. There are times when you long to be thrown back into the water, the humdrum simplicity of ordinary, selfish human existence.

Who says that fishing is easy? It is a struggle, a death, an ultimate change of existence. It is a process of being pulled from everything that we know into something so free, so incredibly other, into God’s service…into life itself.

Words from the Cross

2011-01-10T09:43:00.004-05:00

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
The Gospel of Luke

It takes a certain kind of strength and faithfulness not to just skip Good Friday. I am constantly surprised at how many of my flock can’t make it. When I was in South Carolina at a little church, I would sit in silence for the three hours that Jesus hung on the cross and there would be one person with me at times, sometimes no one. So many people don’t want to think about the pain that Jesus endured, about the death that he suffered. It is just too raw, too difficult. So we get busy. We just can’t make it. Just take me straight to Easter, I don’t want the mess. It’s too hard to look at death in the face. Only certain people have the strength and you, my friends, are among them.

Jesus spoke only seven times during the three hours that he hung on the cross. Physicians who have researched what happened to his body as it was being crucified conclude that Jesus suffocated. Fluid would have slowly filled his lungs. He also could have bled to death. We are not sure which of these two led to his death. But we do know that it would have been very painful to speak, especially in a way that could have been heard by those below the cross. So when Jesus spoke, it was important. These words were spoken in agony. Each word cost him precious moments of life. Each word was uttered with enormous effort. And that is why, during the three hours in which Jesus hung on the cross, we meditate on his words. These are not some off the cuff statements that Jesus made. These words ate up his oxygen, accelerated his dying. These were intentional and costly words.

Jesus words are recorded once in Matthew and Mark, three times in Luke and three times in John. It is not clear in what precise order they occurred, since different phrases are recorded in different gospels, but each year we do our best to place them in some kind of chronological order.

In the Lucan account, Jesus’ first words are Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

Have you ever been in excruciating pain? Have you ever broken a bone or given birth to a child, cut yourself to the bone or thrown out your back? Most of us have endured some kind of extreme physical pain at some point in our lives and we recognize that one of the most evident features of pain is how all consuming it is. When you are in excruciating pain, there is nothing else that seems to matter. It is a state of extreme self-absorption. When I am in pain, I cannot think of the needs of the world or the desires of my friends, all that absorbs my mind is processing the pain. It fills my consciousness and there is not room for anything else.

Jesus was able to think of others in the midst of physical agony. He was not concerned for himself, his thoughts were on us. And that in and of itself is a miracle. He was so selfless, so loving that even agonizing pain could not make him forget his love for the human race.

And even if we put aside the physical pain for a moment, what about the mental pain? Jesus is in the pit of despair. He is dying. He has any and every right to be totally and completely self-absorbed. Talk about an opportunity to feel sorry for yourself! I would have milked it for all its worth. But he does not let this complete injustice make him self-absorbed. His first words are not for himself. He is not thinking about his pain or his death or even how unfair all of this is. He does not beg for mercy or to come down. He thinks of Us!

Jesus is concerned that God will not forgive us for crucifying him. He begs for God’s forgiveness. Sucking in each agonizing breath, he begs not for himself but for us.

I don’t know about you but I spend an awful lot of time thinking about myself. The intensity of my self-absorption only seems to increase when I am suffering. All I want to do is to feel better. Jesus was not that way. He was so in love with us that he could not stop thinking about us, even when his lungs were filling up with fluid, even when he could not breathe.

It is also a human tendency to demonize the one that commits violence to you. The one who hurts you is not a person. It is easier to commit a crime when you do not think of the person that you are hurting. Better that they are a spectacle, an event, not a human being.

A college student named Jane was walking through campus at night when she was grabbed from behind. Her assailant dragged her into the woods and began to rip off her clothing. Instead of fighting him, she kept looking into his eyes and saying, “I am Jane. My name is Jane. What is your name? My name is Jane. Are you OK?…”

As she was telling his over and over again that she was a person. And he stopped. He realized that he was hurting a person. He let her go. She began to help him get off drugs and they became friends.

Otis Gray was a chaplain during World War I. He brought communion to the soldiers daily. He counseled them amidst the horror of a kind of war none of them had ever seen before. He held boys as they died. He watched others gun down young men who were so close that you could see the fear in their eyes. He lived in the midst of hell. And he tried to bring God into the lives of these men who saw nothing but violence.

Otis had a good friend, a young man who was also from Kansas. The young man told Otis that if he got out of the war alive, he would start a church with Otis Gray. Together, they would start a church in Kansas.

In the mist of one of the worst battles on the fields of France, Otis found himself in a ditch along with his soldiers. They were ordered to run into the no man’s land between themselves and the Germans. The boy from Kansas climbed out of the ditch and began shooting. Otis watched as his young friend was gunned down. He watched as the boys body hit the ground. And, at that moment, he had to make a spit decision.

It came from deep inside. It was not a decision that could have been justified with words. It was just a gut level decision. Otis climbed out of the no man’s land and went to the boy. Seeing that the boy was alive, he gave him communion. And then, he carried his friend to safety.

They both survived the war and started a church together. It is called St. James Episcopal Church. But to this day, the people of that church say that the worship began that day so long ago, on the fields of France, when one man was able to put another man’s life ahead of his own. When someone, for just a moment, became a true servant of Christ.

That is all that we can hope for, really. For moments of time when we are able to leave our self-centered notions behind and see through Jesus’ eyes. And see the pain and the ignorance and the needs of so many people for God and for forgiveness. When Jesus said that the people did not know what they were doing in crucifying him, he was right. We had stopped seeing him as a person. But he never stopped seeing us.

When Jesus looked out across the place of the skull, he saw people who needed God. He saw people who were lost and had no idea what they were doing. He saw you and he saw me. He saw all our stupidity and all our mistakes. And he wanted us to be forgiven. He wanted us to be saved.

And he hopes for us still.

Never has there been another human being who was so selfless, so giving. We can never be as loving as Christ, but we can move a step closer. We can step out and introduce ourselves to people in pain, we can think about the needs of others. We can try to know what we are doing.

Coming Down From Heaven

2011-01-03T11:10:00.000-05:00

Did you see the eclipse on Monday night? My mother mentioned it at dinner Monday night and the time stuck in my mind. 2.30 a.m. I want to see that, I thought to myself. Then I resumed parenting and working and forgot all about it. But God had not forgotten.

At 2.30 on the dot, I woke from a deep sleep. Startled at the time, I still struggled to get out of my warm bed despite the fact that it was clear to me that I was supposed to see this cosmic event. I did rouse my lazy body and went to my son Jacob’s room to wake him. He went outside with me, where we witnessed one of the most beautiful celestial events that I have ever seen. Jake wanted to go back to sleep so I woke up Luke, his older brother. Luke looked at the eclipse for awhile, then he too wanted to go back to bed, so I woke up Max, my youngest and carried him downstairs. He loved the sight but was cold and wanted to return to his warm bed, so I woke my husband, JD, and stood outside marveling with him, until he too asked to go inside. Then I stood out there alone, until my neck hurt.

The sight of that eclipse granted me a moment of pure awe. These kind of moments happen briefly to many of us, when we become overwhelmed with the size of the Universe and our own relative obscurity. It is so powerful, this sense of awe, but it does not last for long. I don’t think that our small human brains can stretch that far. We can only contemplate God’s greatness for a short period of time before our minds begin to hurt and shrink back to the daily worries and thoughts of our lives.

I remembered how small we human creatures are in comparison with the vast expanse of the Universe. That eclipse was millions of miles away and yet it was considerably closer than most of the rest of outer space. The Universe is vast and we are tiny in comparison. And the God who makes it all, that God is far beyond anything that our tiny brains can fathom.

What does it mean that the God of the Universe, the God of light years, of eclipses and cosmic events, that this vast Creator became a baby? For years I have spoken to congregations about what it means for us to have God do such a thing, to make such a sacrifice. But I have never really asked myself what it must have been like for God, to be so large, so vast and creative and exquisite, and to empty himself/herself/itself of all greatness in order to become helpless. What was it like for God? We can never fully know this for we can never fully know what it is like to be God, but we can catch glimpses of the nature of this sacrifice and of what it took for God to become human.

I caught a glimpse of God's sacrifice in my friend, Margaret. Margaret was a traveler of the world, a lover of art and books. Her husband was in the foreign service and they lived much of their lives abroad. They had never wanted to be encumbered by children, they were free to chose their own destinies, free to live life fully. Margaret loved to read, to listen to music, to paint. Then, at forty years old, Margaret got pregnant.

An amniocentesis revealed that the child had severe developmental disorders. He might die, the doctors said. And if he lives, he will be compromised, very compromised. His life would hardly be life, just a boy who was unable to communicate or even feed himself.

Margaret already loved the child before he was even born. She could not explain why, she just loved him. But her husband did not. Worried about what this would do to his career, he left Margaret for a younger woman.

Margaret had no other family. She gave birth to the baby boy alone in a hospital in New York City. There were complications, many complications. The baby had to have multiple surgeries just to stay alive. He would never walk, never talk. His life-span was shortened. But from the moment that she looked upon him, Margaret felt that she had never seen anyone so beautiful. She changed the course of her life, devoting herself to his care. She did not travel. She was on a tight budget. She spent much of her day cleaning and feeding him. They communicated only in smiles and in touch, for he had no words that he could speak. She was often alone with him.

Margaret gave up her wide open life to give herself to this boy. Her life became small, it revolved around his eating and sleeping habits. She would dress him in the morning and clean him, setting him up in his wheelchair. She would bend down over his wheelchair and speak to him, looking right into his eyes. She would take him for slow walks, the same walks every day, for he loved routine and repetition. He loved to look at the sky, the trees. Anything out of the ordinary scared him so she made sure that they lived very simply and predictably. She played him beautiful music and read to him, hoping that some of it would sink into his soul. She was never sure what was reaching him, what he could hear and understand. She would feed him at the same time every night and put him to bed. When he was just 18 and Margaret just 58, her son died.

Her friends thought that her life was ruined. She spent 18 years tied to an invalid. But Margaret did not see it that way. To this day, she says that he is the best thing that happened to her in her life. He changed her forever. It was her greatest joy.

God chose to limit the Divine self, to move from the vast expanse of space and the beauty of heaven, to be condensed into a tiny human body, helpless and cold, held by his mother. To be burped and fed, cold and hungry, to grow in a body limited by time and space. To walk and talk, breath and eat, to sleep and wake again. And all this was so limiting for the One who created all things.

Scholars believe that Jesus was born in a cave. The shepherds still dig caves to escape the wind among the hills of Bethlehem. We cannot imagine the dirt and stench of such a place, so most Americans prefer to picture Jesus in a little wooden shack, kind of cozy and clean. But he was born in a cave full of animals. He was born in the dirt.

Jesus was not born into some fairy tale, don’t be fooled. The night was silent and it was holy but it was not fantasy land. It was holy precisely because it was real. Jesus was born in the heart of the Middle East to a homeless couple who did not know where they were going to eat next. He was born into a land with a dictator who was so paranoid that he would order the slaughter of baby boys. He was born in the messy, painful, beautiful world that WE live in, and nowhere else. Jesus came HERE.

I have never heard of a King who willingly gave up power. I have never heard of a powerful person who gave up power. It goes counter to all that we are taught in this world. Every day we hear of people who earn money, spend money. We see ads where people eat, go on vacation, take care of themselves. Everything in this world is about ME, the supreme Me and how do I take care of myself and what do I deserve. But Margaret loved her son more than she loved her life. God loves us that much, to give up being Creator and become man. God just did it. God condensed the whole Universe, decided that it would be better to live in only three dimensions instead of 300 dimensions. And it was God’s joy. That’s how much we are loved. It was and it is God’s joy to become Incarnation, in the flesh.

Why is it that we think we need to get better, to more holy in order to grow closer to God? Why is it that we feel that we must be well behaved to deserve God’s love? There are people who do not come to church because they do not feel worthy. There are people who shy away from God because they feel so small, so petty, so broken. They see this beautiful place, hear this beautiful music and they feel unworthy. Are you one of them? Are you afraid that God will not want you because you are so limited, because you have made so many mistakes?

Don’t buy into the myths about Christmas. Christmas is not a perfect time, when everyone gets along. Christmas is not designed for the perfect family with 2 children and a picket fence. It is not reserved for the harmonious and happy. So you don’t have to pretend to be someone you are not. Christmas is a miracle that happened in the midst of a mess.

God came to us even though we cannot see clearly and we don’t know how to live our lives right. God comes to you and God waits for you. God finds you so beautiful, with all your mistakes and problems and everything. God find you so beautiful.

I looked up at the moon that night and I asked myself, “God, how could you do this for me? How could you leave all that majesty and come down to me? Why me? Why did you come down for me?”

The light shone down as it did that night on the shepherds. And I knew that the answer was so simple, so simple that it is hard to believe.

Because I love you.

Finding Home

2011-01-03T10:41:00.000-05:00

An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt..."
Matthew 2:13

Something strange happened to me when I was pregnant with each of my three boys. I got this instinct to nest. I wanted their nursery set up just right. Two weeks before my first boy was born, I got kind of rabid and rearranged all the cans in my pantry. Now, if you know me, rearranging cans is not normally on the top of my priority list. But some part of me wanted to make the home perfect and ready for the baby.

Every parent wants their child born into a peaceful, idyllic life. I think that is why we work so hard getting ready, with baby showers, books, the latest gear. Because we want to do our very best, to make the child have the perfect childhood. Stability, love, a good home- Dr. Spock, the baby guru, says that all of these things are essential to a happy childhood.

But within the first week of a baby’s life, something happens. Maybe you burst into tears, or you leave them in a dirty diaper too long. Maybe they get sick or you get sick or your mother-in-law drives you nuts. Whatever it is, the world does not present itself as perfectly as you’d hoped. And the child’s peaceful, stable life is disrupted. And things only get crazier in the toddler years.

We try to create Eden for our kids and when things break or we disappoint ourselves, we feel as if we hurt or ruined the child. Adults will spend valuable time in therapy discovering how the broken world of their families shaped them and gave them sometimes bad habits or feelings. But there is a myth behind therapy and that is the myth of perfection. The Myth of the perfect home. It simply does not exist. No home, no family is perfect. Not here, at least, not on planet earth.

Look at Jesus. He is born to the most incredible parents. There were both good and faithful people. But Jesus had no stability at all as a child. He was born without a home at all. Presumably, Mary and Joseph settled in Bethlehem. Scholars now believe that the Wise Men did not arrive until somewhere in Jesus’ toddler years. But then, in today’s gospel, Joseph has a dream and God urges him to move. So Mary and Jesus had to walk to Egypt with a toddler.

We like to picture Mary on a donkey, holding a baby. But donkeys were for those who had money, and there is little indication that Joseph had much. And even if they had a donkey, can you imagine walking from Israel to Egypt with a toddler? I can hardly drive in a car with a toddler, and that is with videos, music and snacks. The journey to Egypt was at least 300 miles. No hotels, no rest stops, no McDonalds or playscapes. Just dust and dirt and the stars.

This was not the stable life that Dr. Spock talks about. This was not peaceful, this was not home. There were bands of robbers, people who told stories around fires at night. Camels and slave traders. This was no play date, folks. Jesus definitely did not have a set nap time. Jesus was raised on foot.

I used to sit and pray in the chapel of the Holy Innocents at St. James Church in Kansas. I would look up at the great stained glass window above the altar and think about all those little boys who were killed by Herod because of his paranoia. All those children, dead. It is unfathomable to me, that a ruler could order the killing of babies and children and still worse that anyone would carry it out.

It seems that Jesus was fleeing violence for a good portion of his life. He was hunted as a child, forced to move about to stay alive. And later, he would be hunted and killed as an adult. There was no home for Jesus here on earth. He did not model stability for us. So phrases like a Christian home, what do they mean? Jesus never had one.

Most of us spend our lives searching for the perfect home or trying to keep one. We hold this illusion in our minds of the perfect family in a beautiful house with lots of love and harmony. We long for this. And yet, a home is a building which needs to be cleaned and repaired, which changes over time. Even the best homes do not last long enough.

I spent this past week packing my mother-in-laws belongings. She will be moving to Jacksonville to be closer to us. We will have to sell her five bedroom house in Memphis, Tennessee. She will most likely move to a two bedroom apartment. We spent five days saying goodbye to things and having to make decisions about what to keep and what to sell. Every little trinket had a memory. It was hard work, and not just on the body. It was grieving work, having to say goodbye to so much.

But God does this to all of us when we grow old. We too are forced to move, like Jesus, like Moses, like Abraham. For there is no true home for those who love God here on earth and in the end, we all will be forced to shed all of our things. There is nothing that we can bring with us when we go to meet God. Not even a suitcase.

When we say home, we are really referring to something else. We are referring to a hunger that we have for deep and abiding peace and comfort. We are not referring to a bit of furniture or a house full of relatives. We are referring to something deep inside of ourselves, some longing that we have for stability. We are really longing for God.

The Psalmist writes, “How dear to me is your dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts!”

Grace Church in Orange Park has a wonderful sign outside of their front door. It is very simple. It says Welcome Home.

When we long for the beautiful nursery or the perfectly stacked pantry, what we are really looking for can be found here. Here is the home that you have always longed for, with a meal that will truly feed you. This place is not perfect, but it can be a place where you can rest, here in the service on Sundays, you can truly rest.

There is a reason why every Sunday we do the Holy Eucharist. We know that you need that comfort, that stability. Sure things change a bit with the seasons, but basically, we do the same thing over and over and over again. And God would have us do it this way for two thousand years because God knows that we need a place where we can rest. And that the children of God need some predictability.

Because out there, everything is changing. You will be moving, like it or not, you will have to say goodbye to your things. Your bodies will change, your minds will change. Your friends and relatives, even your pets will change. But here, on Sundays, we will tell the story over and over again. The sacred words will run over you like water running over a rock, shaping your life forever.

Don’t look for stability out there. Don’t look for comfort. Look to serve. Seek out ways that you can serve God. Try to follow God’s will, for you will be moving, but the question is where…

Come here for comfort, here to God’s house, to the place where the Eucharist is offered. Come Home.

The Doubts of John the Baptist

2010-12-13T11:35:00.000-05:00

Who was John the Baptizer? We know so little about him. There is this huge gap in his story…

Born to Zechariah and Elizabeth, John was born into privilege. He was the son of the High Priest in Jerusalem, the son of the man who was chosen to enter the Holy of Holies. Zechariah was a Levite, of the priestly lineage. Only one man was chosen to enter the room that was considered the most holy. Only one man on one day out of the whole year. And it was Zechariah who was chosen.

As the son of this high priest, John would have known every privilege. He would have been educated by the best rabbis. He would have known his Scripture. He was born as an only child to parents who had longed to have a child and had even given up hope. They must have doted on him, cherished him. He would have had so much love. He would have had everything that a child could need or want.

Then there is this huge gap in his life story. The Scripture tells us only the essentials. And the next time we see John, he is living as a homeless man in the desert. He is dirty. He wears animal skins for clothes and he eats bugs for dinner. What happened to him? I would love to sit down and hear his story.

What was it like to leave everything behind? What was it like to disappoint his parents? When did he leave? When did he realize that God had something else in mind, something more than just being a temple priest, something much harder? And did he miss the comforts of Jerusalem? Was he ever lonely? Did he ever wonder what he had done?

John the Baptizer seems so powerful, screaming about repentance. He must have had this incredible charisma, for people would have walked long distances to hear him. And he baptized people in the River Jordan, urging them to confess their sins and get ready for the Messiah who is to come. It is clear to me that somewhere on the road to the high priesthood, John encountered God and God told him that he was to leave his family, his wealth, his city and find God alone in the emptiness of the desert. And that experience was enough to propel him into the desert.

John was so charismatic that many people thought he was the One, but he was clear that he was not the Messiah, even though he clearly had a following and even disciples who followed him everywhere. He seemed to be such an authority that people were drawn to him. He seemed so sure of God’s will.

When Jesus finally arrives at the River, John recognizes him immediately. In the presence of Jesus, John asks his first question. For the first time, he seems unsure. “Shouldn’t you be baptizing me?” he asks.

After the event of the baptism, we hear little about John. Again, there is a gap. The next that we see him, he is in prison. We do not know why or how John was imprisoned. I imagine that his prophetic nature and the fact that he believed Jesus to be the Messiah eventually got him in trouble with the Roman authorities. We do not know how he got there, but one thing we do know…that, in prison, John began to doubt.

John sends some of his disciples to Jesus with the following question,

Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

In other words, Did I make a mistake?

What happened to this incredibly powerful man in prison? What led him to begin to doubt that Jesus was the one? It sounds from his question like he is questioning his whole life. Was Jesus the one that he had been waiting for? And if Jesus was not the one, was there ANYONE who would come? What in the world was he doing, hanging out in the wilderness hollering about salvation? Weren’t his parents right when they told him that he was out of his mind leaving all that they had given him? What if he had made a terrible mistake?

Terry Waite was imprisoned years ago in Lebanon. He was working for the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was trying to broker negotiations so that the Lebanese government would release foreign prisoners. They captured him and he spent four years in prison. Much of the time, he was in solitary confinement. Alone in the dark, he would go through the liturgy of the Holy Eucharist in his head to delineate one day from another. As a boy, he had loved the prayer book so much that he had memorized it and he would later write that it was God’s words in liturgy which held him from the brink of insanity and despair.

At other times, his captors would chain him to a radiator or transport him in a refrigerator to new sites. Many times, they set up an execution and he thought that he was going to die, but they were only mocking him.

Waite would later talk about the doubts that ran through his mind in prison. We all have them, we human beings. It seems that it is part of our nature to doubt, not just God, but also ourselves. And when we are treated badly or hated by others, the doubt can easily turn to despair.

‘Help me, Jesus,” John was saying, “I am having doubts.”

When Jesus hears of John’s question to him, he does not just send back a yes, he tells the disciples to relay to John everything that Jesus is doing. Tell him that the lame are walking, the blind have been given their sight. Tell him that you saw Scripture being fulfilled, for these are the things that the Scripture tells us the Messiah will do. Jesus knows that his actions will speak louder than his words and he wants to reassure John that he is, in fact, the Messiah and that John’s life was not lived in vain.

As John’s disciples go away, Jesus turns and tells the crowd about who John really is. He tells them that John the Baptist is about as close to God as anyone can be. “I tell you,” he says, “Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist…” No one.

This man, who suffers in jail, who wonders if his life was worth anything at all- this man was the greatest according to Jesus. This man was closest to God. What does this tell us, you and me?

It tells us that even the greatest saint has doubts. It tells us that God does not fault us or get angry at us when we wonder if any of this is true at all. It tells us that perhaps our greatest doubts lie not in God but in ourselves, whether we really are loved, whether we really are worthy. It tells us that we are not alone when we find ourselves wondering about the decisions that we have made and if we have done as well as we could.

John the Baptist had doubts. He doubted God’s plan and he doubted himself.

Think of Mother Theresa in all her incredible work. Only after she died did we discover that she was suffering, not able to experience the presence of God. Even Mother Theresa, the most saintly person that I can think of in my lifetime, even she struggled.

What is it that makes us think that doubt is bad and certainty is holy? What makes us question ourselves when we wonder how the Universe really was made and if we are following God’s will for our lives? Why do we see questioning as a sign of weakness?

The human being cannot see God. We live in darkness. Light penetrates us from God in many ways, in the love of others, in prayer, in worship. But we cannot see clearly. And when we suffer or when we are treated poorly, the curtain is pulled even more tightly over our eyes and we wonder if God loves us at all, or if God is out there at all.

But to doubt and wonder does not make us any less loved. As it turns out, some of the prophets of old doubted. John the Baptizer, who devoted his entire life to waiting for the Messiah, even he wondered if he had made a mistake.

So learn to live with your doubts and your worries. They are part of the complexity that makes up the human being. Do not berate yourself or try to fix them. Do not try to silence these doubts or believe that if you just prayed enough, they would go away. They are part of your nature and you can still worship and follow Christ even in the midst of them. John did.

You are a beloved, marvelous, doubting, questioning child of God. And so was John.

King of Kings

2010-11-22T10:23:00.003-05:00

On Friday night, I had the pleasure of watching The Women of Lockerbie, a play about the Pan Am Flight that was blown up over a small Scottish town in the late 1980’s. The play was at Florida State Community college and was directed by Ken McCullough, one of our beloved choir members. In an hour and a half, these brilliant college students took us into the horror and grief that developed as a result of this tragedy. They sobbed on stage, portraying aspects of grief that are rarely seen and never discussed in public. It was a play about the depths of human sadness and the way that love can begin to help it heal.

A 20-year-old boy was killed in the crash. His mother cannot recover from his death. She questions God. She questions everything. The boy’s father, her husband, concludes that God must be simply absent from this mess of a world. After all, how can God be in charge when things are so broken?

This is the question, isn’t it? If indeed God is King, Lord of all the Universe, then why does God allow the tragedies that occur? Why allow us to suffer? And why is the suffering so random, so unpredictably dispersed? Some people have such difficult lives while others of us seem to know such blessings. What kind of a system is this? Maybe God just danced with us at the beginning, in the creation, and then sent us off spinning into the Universe by ourselves…

Today is the final Sunday of the Christian year. Next Sunday, we will begin the season of Advent, or the coming, when we wait for the coming of Christ. But today we culminate another year of worship and prayer . This Sunday is called Christ the King Sunday. It seems that at the final Sunday of the Christian year, the Church recalls that God is in fact in charge. God has the final word.

Of course, the title King came originally to Jesus as slander. The term King of the Jews was used to mock him when he hung naked and helpless on a cross. It was a name that was designed to make Jesus feel shame. After all, he wasn’t being treated as a King but as a common criminal. King of the Jews. It was the name that was meant to get under his skin, the kind of name that you and I have been called, the one that plays again and again in our minds like a broken record when we don’t feel good about ourselves. King of the Jews. King of the Jews.

But Jesus turned that name around. With the power of the resurrection, he turned what was a shameful death into the ultimate act of power and forgiveness and we have been calling him King of the Universe since.

Do you remember the words of Handles Messiah, the Halleluia Chorus?

King of Kings

Lord of Lords.

He shall reign forever and ever.

Back in Jesus’ day, the best form of government was a peaceful kingdom, a kingdom ruled by someone who truly loved his subjects. A true king could bring peace and prospertity, like David and Solomon once had done. A king was someone who could literally change the world and make it a better place in which to live. The ideal king would be so smart, so almost divine that he would know how to make the most difficult of decisions and could render justice and instill goodness in the hearts of people. Under a true king’s rule, all things would be righted.

We no longer have this concept of kingship. It is just a fairytale to us. We just hope that our Presidents will boost the economy and not make too many horrific mistakes. We take the time to gossip and gawk as Prince William finally proposes to Kate Middleton, but its nothing that could effect our lives. It;s nothing more than something to gossip about, a beautiful wedding on TV. We certainly don’t believe that a king could fix anything. Kingdoms are usually either purely ceremonial or else corrupt and backward these days.

Think back to when you were a child, to the time when someone read you a fairytale. Think back to the good man who became King, married the beautiful Queen and rode off into the sunset. It was happily ever after when a good king came, remember? Sometimes, we can catch glimpses of this at the movies or at the Magic Kingdom, but it is hidden under special effects and sales pitches. So you must use your imaginations today to think of what a benevolent king could do and mean for a kingdom, and to reach back to understand what such a term meant in Jesus’ day.

But if Jesus is in fact the King that we all have been looking for, why do we suffer? Why do those who agree to submit to his rule still have bad things happen? What kind of a king lets his subjects suffer? What kind of a king allows cancer and hunger, homelessness and helplessness? There is so much beauty in the world, yes, but there is also so much pain.

At the beginning of the service, every week, we say Blessed be God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. And Blessed be the Kingdom, now and forever. Amen. Where is the kingdom? Does God rule here or not?

To realize that Jesus is King is to admit that Christ is in charge. And in order to admit that God is in charge, we must admit one more thing as well. We must admit that we do not understand that rule, that we do not have the answers.

People often ask me if their prayers make a difference. Will God do what I ask? They inquire. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I say. But God does answer every time, often we just don’t see the answers. God does reign, but how exactly, we do not know.

Why is it so hard for us to admit that we do not know? Does God make cancer, no, I do not believe that, but cancer is part of what happens to many of us here. Here is what I believe it means when we say that Christ is King.

It means that despite all the things we do not understand, that everything will be alright. It means that we cannot see clearly here on this earth. One day, as St. Paul says, we will see face to face and everything will become clear, but until that time we are to trust, for subjects often do not understand the ways of the one who reigns, we are simply not capable. Christ’s kingship means that everything will be OK, that we too will one day live happily ever after. Maybe that is why the fairytales mean so much to us.

There is a beautiful video on YouTube. The Knight Foundation decided to fund a project called Random Acts of Culture. They hired opera singers, a conductor, and an incredible organist. This past October, on a random Saturday, they pulled off a random act of culture at Macy’s in downtown Philadelphia. The place was packed with shoppers getting a jumpstart on their Christmas shopping, as the camera runs, you see the crowds, the impatience, the anxiety as money is changed hands. And then something happens to break into the world of the mall.

All of a sudden, the organ begins to play. The organ at Macy’s in Philly is one of the most famous pipe organs in the world. And then, random people all over the store begin to sing The Halleluia Chorus from Handle’s Messiah. KING OF KINGS they sing! And LORD OF LORDS. KING OF KINGS and LORD OF LORDS. AND HE SHALL REIGN FOREVER AND EVER.

All of a sudden the store changes. It becomes a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. People begin to sing along, the smiles are huge. A baby is lifted into the air to dance. Old women and young children are looking up with radiance in their eyes. Some conduct. And oh, the smiles, the looks on the faces of these people. They are so beautiful.

The Kingdom was there all along, hidden in the midst of their harried lives. And when the music began, it was awakened. For a few moments, they knew as we know, that God is in charge and that everything will be OK.

Amen.

The Obstacle Course

2010-11-01T09:40:00.001-04:00

I was one of those kids that went trick or treating far too late in life. I was fourteen and still out there, pounding the pavement, hoping to get gobs of candy. Maybe it was the fact that my mom was a healthfood freak. Maybe it was the fact that I loved costumes. But whatever the reason, I went out there every year far into my teens. I was one of those kids that people dread appearing, who comes late in the evening with a huge sack full of sweets.

This one year my girlfriends and I were carrying pillowcases and we had been out for hours. It was pitch dark and we were on the edge of a park. We had just climbed the stairs to the home of an old woman, who had opened her door and was about to reach towards her candy bowl when someone came up behind us. The old woman let out a shreak and shut the door in our faces. We turned around to see three young men with nylons over their faces. “Give us your candy,” they said.

One of the girls with me was named Julie Getman. Julie had red hair and she was someone that you didn’t want to mess with. Julie was not at all mean, she was just tough. She would tell it like it was and she did not put up with anything. When Julie wanted something, she usually got it. She was incredibly tenacious.

One of the young men grabbed Julie’s pillow case and tried to yank it from her. Well, he chose the wrong girl. She held on for dear life. That young man dragged her down the street for almost half the block before he gave up altogether and Julie was wearing really high heels! But she was NOT about to give up that great candy that she had worked so hard to collect. No Way. She just held on.

Zaccheus had a lot in common with my friend Julie. He was a short guy with enormous will and tenacity. Zaccheus got what he wanted and, for most of his life, what he wanted was money. He worked his way up as a tax collector, collecting money from his brother and sister Jews no matter how poor they were or how much they begged him. He gave out loans, sometimes cheating people. After all, the people were so gullible. It was easy for him to make an easy buck. He lived in a nice home and had every kind of comfort in life. But something was missing.

One day, Zaccheus heard that the great teacher Jesus was coming. When he heard the news, something in him became hungry. He longed to see Jesus fiercely, though I doubt he could have articulated why. Somehow it became incredibly important that he be able to look upon the face of this prophet, this man who was so close to God. Zaccheus was hungry to encounter Christ.

On the day that Jesus came through Zaccheus’ home town of Jericho, the crowds were out in full force. Zaccheus could not see a thing. He was surrounded on every side by people, pressing in and talking, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Rabbi, the man who had performed miracles. Zaccheus could not stand taking a back seat, so he did whatever he could to see the face of Jesus. He ran up ahead and climbed a tree.

I can just see the little man, scrambling up a tree in his fancy robes. Like a lizard, he must have climbed with enormous skill and dexterity. He was no longer concerned with appearances or what people might think of him. He just focused on getting up there, so that he could catch a glimpse of the holy man. From the tree, Zaccheus could finally see. He watched as Jesus walked toward him. And to his surprise, Jesus stopped under that tree and spoke.

“Zaccheus,” Jesus said. “I want to come and eat at your house today.”

Zaccheus scrambled down the tree. Everyone must have been staring. Here was one of the most hated men in town. Loathed by all, he was always alone, a social outcast. And Jesus wanted to go eat in his house, the home of one who had robbed and cheated most of the population of the city? What was Jesus thinking? It made everyone angry. How could a holy man eat with such a sinner?

But Zaccheus pursued Jesus with the same intensity that he had pursued his wealth. And once he saw Jesus, his money meant nothing to him. “Lord,” he said, “I will give half of everything that I own to the poor and if I have cheated anyone, I will give him four times as much.” And so, a sinner was found.

Zaccheus was found, but let’s look at what it meant for him to be found. For Zaccheus, to be found by Jesus meant a lot of work. He had to give stuff awa. He had to face a lot of angry people and make ammends for the things that he had done in the past. He had to admit that he had cheated and offer to repay those whom he had hurt. Zaccheus was entering into a life-long journey of sacrifice and service. This meeting with Jesus, this was only the beginning.

Dining with Jesus, looking at him, changed Zaccheus’ life forever. But the story did not end there. The story had only begun. Zaccheus was saved, he was found, as Jesus said. But being found by God means a lot of work. Believe you me, I don’t think that life for Zaccheus was free from obstacles or pain. But no matter what the road blocks, I believe that Zaccheus mastered them, after all, he was a climber.

I met an incredible man this week. His name is John Baxter. He is an Episcopalian, a member of St. Mark’s Church here in Jacksonville. He retired from a successful business and found himself asking a question of Jesus: “What can I do to follow you?” Broken-hearted by the racial disparities in this city, he asked some black leaders what he could do to help. They told him that he could do nothing for their generation, but please, help the children.

So John began to look into building a school. He visited with churches and leaders in the city and began to get the impression that perhaps a charter school might be best. He visited with KIP schools across the country, but they refused to come to Florida for a variety of reasons. Determined to let nothing stop him, John began to fundraise and to dream. Today, Tiger Academy sits on the North West part of the city. By partnering with the YMCA, John was able to build an incredible new school. I walked its halls on Friday. It is truly amazing. The children are so happy and so much learning is taking place. When they see visitors, they make the sign of a tigerclaw by reaching out their fingers and then pulling them back. I never saw so many smiles.

The story of Zaccheus didn't end when Jesus dined with him, it was only just beginning. And your story does not end here at the altar, it begins here. Out there, God has asked you to follow into a world that is FULL of obstacles, crowds that obscure your vision, people who dislike you, failure, you name it. The Christian walk is not a stoll, it is an obstacle course. Believe me, it is an obstacle course.

So please, do not think that you are doing anything wrong if you come to church and when you leave this place, life is no easier to you than before you came. Believing in Christ does NOT make your life easier, if anything , it makes it harder. How we came to assume that the Christian walk was peaceful and easy, I will never know. He brings us a SWORD. He asked us to follow him and then he walked to Golgotha to die.

If you are not challenged by what you are giving and how you are serving, then you are not doing enough. The Christian life should leave you afraid almost all the time. You should be doing things, stretching yourself in ways that feel almost too much. Life with Christ is that way, it is a series of trees to be climbed. But the joy that comes along with the fear is great. Oh, it is great.

As I drove back to the Cathedral from Tiger Academy, I could see two things in John’s eyes. I could see light and joy and I could see fatigue. And when I asked if he would be willing to serve on the Board of our Cathedral School, he said Yes. Even though he didn’t know if he could make all the meetings, even though he is tired, he said YES.

The I Dont Wanna Syndrome

2010-10-13T10:26:00.000-04:00

Naaman the Syrian was a sick man. He suffered from leprosy, a terrible disease in which the skin of a human being becomes white and flakey and falls off, eventually maiming whole limbs and killing a person. Highly contagious, leprosy was a form of social suicide. To contract the disease meant to be forced to live an isolated life. Whenever a leper entered the village, he or she had to call out ahead “LEPER! LEPER!” so that everyone who was in the vicinity could run away.

Naaman must have been some kind of a soldier, because the King of Syria demands that he stay and continue to lead the army in battle. Naaman tries to go about his daily life, but the pain of the skin disease plagues him daily, hourly. He begs God to be healed.

As in so many of our lives, God speaks to Naaman through people. In this case, God speaks to Naaman through the servant of his wife. And Naaman shows what an incredible man he is by listening. It was unheard of to speak to a servant and take their advice in those days, let alone a servant from another foreign land. And she was a woman to boot, less than human and considered stupid. But Naaman listens to her and his healing begins.

Often our healing, the righting of our life with God, begins when we finally give up on our way and begin to listen. God may be telling you something, but you have to be willing to listen to the voices all around you, including the ones that you may have written off.

The servant girl is from Israel. She tells Naaman to go to the King of Israel, that there is a prophet in that land who can heal him. So Naaman takes her advice. He sends a letter ahead telling the King of Israel that he is coming to be healed of his leprosy.

The King of Israel is distraught. Here was this four-star general from an enemy nation coming to his land to be healed. What would he do when they could not heal him? This seemed like a terrible idea. The king was scared stiff.

But the prophet Elisha was not scared. Send the General to me, he said. So Naaman travles a great distance with a huge entourage of servants and camels and donkeys, right up to the door of Elisha's humble abode. Naaman is seeking some difficult treatment or penance to bear so that he will be healed of this terrible sickness. But Elisha doesn't even come out of his house! He sends a message to Naaman instructing him to go and bathe in the river Jordan. In other words, all that Elisha says is Go and take a bath.

Naaman is mad. How dare Elisha be so condescending! Why didn't he come out of his house and wave his hands around and perform a miracle, something that befit a great man. Naaman asks himself, "Why couldn’t I just bathe in my own rivers? Is my land not good enough?" And he refuses to do what Elisha asked.

Sometimes we fight God when God is trying to help us. Do you realize that? Do you fight God sometimes? Sometimes we believe that we should have better treatment, like a direct word from God now and again or some impressive miracle. Why should we just do as the Scriptures tell us? That just seems so mundane, not special enough for you or me. Sometimes we just don't want to let God help us.

Check out my hand. See how badly scratched up it is? On Monday of this past week, I was driving home when a neighbor stopped me. My cat, Ms. Meow, had her collar stuck in her throat. It was gradually choking her, the tags were lodged in her mouth. She was in pain and she would not let the neighbor near her.

I got out of the car and approached Ms Meow. She knows me and loves me. After all, I feed her and she understands what a gift that is. Ms. Meow was once a stray, living off a fish pond at a tiny church in Kansas. We found her and adopted her. She is an inside, outside cat, a fierce hunter but she can snuggle with the best of them.

Ms. Meow let me approach her. She stayed still as I came closer. The neighbor had scissors to cut off her collar, if I could just hold her still. But when I tried to pick her up, she scratched at me and bit me. She ran away, but just a short distance, her mouth forced open in agony.

Oh, honey, I am just trying to help you. I said. I reached for her again. She bit and scratched, but I didn’t let go. I held on to her and the neighbor cut off the collar quickly and skillfully. Ms. Meow was free but my hand was a bloody mess. I had to go on an antibiotic for ten days and get a tetnus shot.

Ms. Meow knew that I was trying to help her, but she couldn’t seem to help fighting me. That is what Naaman did and that is what many of us do with God. We say, Help me! And God says, Come to church. Give of your resources. Pray. And we say Well, I’ll come when I can. I will pray, but I can’t give money. I just don’t want to. Why do I have to? I don’t wanna!

What God asks of us is so simple. Practice the faith. Pray, Worship, Give. All three. But we want to do things our way, and then we wonder why life doesn’t seem to go as we wish that it would.

Go and bathe in the Jordan says Elisha. I don’t wanna! Responds Naaman. But luckily, his servants talk to him again. How hard can it be? They say. Why don’t you try it?

And so he bathes, and he is made clean. He is changed. The Scripture says that his skin is like the skin of a young boy.

Oh God, he says, Thank you. What can I give you?

Do you want to be made well? The recipe is clear and simple. Practice your faith. You are Christians. Do what Jesus instructed. Pray every day. Worship with your community here at the Cathedral. And, the hardest part, give some of your money. Give it away. Give to the church and Greenpeace and Universities and whatever is of God. Just give it away.

The Vestry has made a statement that hangs in Talliaferro hall. It is a Rule of life. Together with me, they vowed to worship every Sunday, pray daily and give of their resources. It is a simple statement. If you agree with it and want to join us, sign it. We left rooms for lots of people to sign with us.

In the gospel, Jesus heals seven lepers but only one comes back to say Thank you. Giving is our way of saying Thank you. Thank you for healing me. Thank you for creating me. Thank you for enabling me to walk and talk and see and speak. Thank you.

Do you realize that you won the lottery? There were over a million possible people who could have been born in your body. The possibilities of chromosomes were so vast as to be mind boggling, but, out of all those possibilities, God chose to make YOU. God wove you together in your mothers womb and the fact that you exist at all is such a miracle that you cannot even begin to wrap your mind around it.

When will you stop charging forward, doing things in your own way, and turn around? When will it be time to stop and look at the face of Christ and say, Thank you. Thank you for making me, for sustaining me. Thank you for the eyes that I have that work so that I can see light and color. Thank you for the friends that you have given me. Thank you that I can hear music. Thank you for life, God, thank you for life.

Why does it take illness for us to appreciate health? Why does it take poverty for us to appreciate wealth? Don’t wait until the end of your life to say thank you to God. Listen to the voices of those around you, listen to God’s call to you, and give of yourself endlessly in an act of thanksgiving.

Thr Better Question

2010-10-06T16:36:00.000-04:00

My friend had a little boy who was absolutely adorable. He was clearly smart as a whip and at six months old, he would smile and laugh out loud. By the time he was well over a year old, he still had not uttered a word, and his mom began to worry. “Maybe his has some learning disability, maybe he is socially unable to speak or has anxiety…” She, like lots of young moms, was a worry wart. So she went to the pediatrician.

“Well,” the doctor said. “This boy seems happy and healthy to me. Let me ask you this…Do you give him everything that he needs?”

“Oh, well, I try. I feed him when he seems hungry. I know when he is tired. I try to take care of his every need…”

“Try something for me,” the doctor said. “Try not giving him everything he needs. Start with food. Give him a bit but then wait and let him begin to express his own wants and needs. Do not fulfill his needs before he asks. Otherwise, you give him no incentive to speak…”

That afternoon, my friend sat her son down in his highchair and put a few cheerios on it for him to munch on while she did the dishes. He ate them quickly and then gestured for more, but she didn’t put more on his plate. She just stood there staring at him. She told me later that it just about killed her, not just getting him exactly what she knew and he knew that he wanted. But she stood her ground.

Her son’s first word was “MORE.”

I used to bring my sons Luke and Jacob to the nursing home with me when Luke was two and Jake was just a baby. The residents loved my children! If I forgot communion, well, that was not such a big deal, but if I forgot to bring the babies, well, they would be furious. They loved to hold Jake and rock him. And Luke would wander around the room as we did the eucharist together, singing Amazing Grace every week and the Old Rugged Cross.

As a young, frazzled mother, I would often arrive full of diaper bags but missing one thing or another. One week, I forgot the wafers. I called over one of the nurses assistants who brought saltines. So we proceeded with the service. Luke had a bad day and was mad and was hungry. He wanted the service to be over. As I began the holy words, he started yelling, “I don’t want to do a service! AMEN! AMEN!” Then, once we got to the communion, and he saw the saltines, he yelled “MORE CRACKER MORE!!!”

The disciples want more. They have experienced Jesus and the love that he has for God and they want to be more like him. They want more faith, more devotion, more intimacy with God. “Increase our faith!” they demand. Give us more of the good stuff. We want it now.

I am so often struck by how much we are like the disciples. Human nature has not changed one iota since Jesus’ time. They might as well have said, Jesus, Supersize me! I want bigger everything, bigger faith, more devotion. The disciples were able to take the best thing that they had going, namely their relationship with Jesus, and cheapen it. Instead of giving thanks for what they had, they said,” I want more. What you have given me is not enough.”

We do that here in America without even blinking. When is there ever enough? We are constantly saying to ourselves, I want more food, more clothes, more money, more time. We ALWAYS need more of something. We have so convinced ourselves of our need that we can no longer distinguish between needs and wants. Our obeisity rates are the highest in the world because we don’t seem to know when we have had enough food. People who already have weight issues will go to buffets and eat and eat and eat.

Many of our corporations are designed to create new needs. Last year, I heard of an energy bar for dogs! It is designed so that the dog will get more out of his walk. So does your dog NEED it?

In response to the disciples, Jesus a parable about a slave and his master. After the slave has worked all day in the fields, the master will not call him in and say to him, come and join me at the table, instead he will tell the slave to put on his apron and serve his master and, only after he has served, then he can sit down and eat. So we are not to assume that God will invite us to sit down and eat at the banquet. We have work to do first. We are to approach God with humility, as his slaves, grateful for whatever God gives to us.

It is a painful parable that rubs us the wrong way today. We now understand that slavery is a horrible institution that degrades the human being, but Jesus was simply using a daily, familiar reality of his time to make a point about God. He wanted to use an image that would be familiar to the disciples, something that they would see often. So he talks about a slave and his master.

This is the truth, harsh though it sounds. When it comes to our relationship with God, we are not free agents. We are not consumers or independent contractors. We cannot decide when to place our order or just how long we will live. We are slaves. We are servants. We belong to God. For us to ask for more faith is preposterous. It is simply not our place and it will get us nowhere, not because God would be offended, but because we really have no idea what we truly need. Only God knows who we truly are and what we really need.

The best question to ask God is “What can I do to serve?” Asking for more stuff does not ultimately help us in any way. Asking for happiness or peace of mind is all well and good, but what if there is something that we need to learn or experience. The truth is that we really have no idea what we need.

Jesus calls us his little children a lot. Children of God. Like little ones, we don’t always know what is best for us. We would buy stuff like crazy when it does nothing more than increase our attachment to material things. We want better lives, more peaceful or easier. We want this and we want that. But God knows that instead of wanting more, we just need to give and serve. Jesus tells us that serving others is best for us and would make us happier, more fulfilled. God knows that the secret to our spiritual lives lies in our ability to give of ourselves.

If you are feeling as if God has not given you enough: not a good enough life, not enough money, not enough friends, not enough health, or success or time with your loved ones, try giving it away.

We are spending this year listening to Jacksonville and to the roles of Cathedrals through the centuries. And I am hearing God’s call to us. It is coming through loud and clear. And it is so simple. Oh, so simple.

We as a Cathedral are being called to be servants of this city. The masters of this church, the ones who we serve, are not the clergy or the Vestry, it is the children, the disabled and the very old. We are called to serve those that are the most helpless. We are called to give the child a safe place to be nurtured and the best education that we can, for the future of this city depends upon it.

Forty percent of the children in this neighborhood live on or below the poverty line. We have taken the first step in ministering to children by starting the Cathedral School here just five years ago. And today we celebrate this school. Today is Cathedral School Sunday.

This beautiful early-learning center teaches and nurtures children from babies to age 5. The children of this school are happy and loved. I have the blessing of leading them in chapel. A few weeks ago, they decided to ask God if he might reconsider creating cockroaches. They wondered if he might want to come up with another model.

The Board of the Cathedral School is committed to growing the school, offering more scholarships to inner-city children and even growing into elementary school. We are called to serve these children. They are the masters and we are the slaves, for they hold the keys to the future of this city. If our children are loved, we will be OK.

What do you need? What do I need? We don’t need to ask for anything more. We need to give. We need to serve people like these children, the elderly, those who are in pain or need.

Friday night, Jo Hedgepeth died. Jo was one of our most faithful parishioners. She was so pivotal to this place that many of us feel rocked without her presence. The night that she died, Jo’s daughter and son were able to say goodbye and to thank her. They told her that it was OK to go. They gave her something that many people do not give their loved ones who are dying, they gave her permission.

After she died, the nurse told us that her mother had died when she was 25 and that she had begged her mother not to go. She wanted more of her mother, more time. So she begged for her to stay and as a result, her mother had a painful prolonged death. “Don’t ask for more time,” she said, “Give them the gift of letting them go.”

Who are we to ask for more? We are children, servants, slaves. We belong to God. All we can say is Thank you, God, What can I do for YOU?

Hope for a Boy

2010-09-30T09:20:00.000-04:00

I sat in our fellowship hall with two women. Our adult classes and small groups had concluded and we were waiting for the children to emerge. It was close to 8 pm on a Weds night.

A single mom came in and her ten year old boy soon followed. She works full-time at McDonalds and takes the bus to come to us every Wednesday and every Sunday without fail. I could see the strain on her face as she handed her son his math homework and told him to sit down and start. I invited him to come and sit by me.

Within two minutes, I could see a few things about this boy. He had more energy than he knew what to do with. He was smart. And he was struggling to concentrate.

“My teacher hates me,” he said to me.

“I get my problems wrong.”

I watched as he did his math. He understood it but he was rushing and guessing just to get it done. I worked with him on a few problems. He found it hard to concentrate.

I asked his mother if he had ever been evaluated for ADHD. “Oh, yes, he has it!” she said. “But I have never brought him to the doctor.”

Within twenty minutes, I had asked the head of an Episcopal School to email me the name and address of the best psychologist for children in town. And I had someone make a donation to pay for the visit.

This little boy’s life may be altered by his ability to concentrate. And all this happened within a half and hour one evening at church. Such is the power of community.

Why come to church? For certain, we come to learn about God, to give thanks to God and to worship, but we also come to see God at work in the community. There is a great strength that comes when members of a community are united in caring for one another. I have experienced this kind of support in my life and I will never forget it. It can alter a person's life, this kind of pervasive love.

If we could bottle to advertise community, everyone would want to join. But there is no way to adequately explain the grace and power of church until you experience it. The only thing that we can do is continue to invite people in, again and again and again.

Come inside, we say. Come and see. You are welcome here.

I am so glad that this little boy has come inside.

The Lost

2010-09-13T10:09:00.000-04:00

I have a terrible sense of direction. Anyone who has ridden in my car with me can attest. I live with my GPS. We have a close personal bond. It is a GPS for dummies and it is perfect for me. You would never believe how many times I have to drive back and forth to a place before I know my way. It has been ten months since I moved to Jacksonville, and I still use the GPS religiously. I am a person who is easily lost.

There are many ways to get lost. Many of us get lost in our lives. We don’t know how to make the right decisions or who to ask for help. We make decisions sometimes that hurt ourselves and others. We go off in a completely wrong direction and only add to the brokenness and confusion in the world.

Take this crazy guy in Gainesville. How in the world did he come to the conclusion that burning the Quran would make things better on Sept 11th? And how in the world did the media get the idea that it would be wise to blow this all up out of proportion? Will he burn the Quran or won’t he? That seems to be the question. The media is selling loads of papers and everyone is watching as a furniture salesman gains the attention of the world, not through goodness, but through threats of book-burning.

Why do we pay attention to such craziness? Why are we buying papers or turning on our televisions? How could we have let our attention get so diverted?

20 million people are now watching a reality show that films pregnant teenage girls as they decide what to do with their lives and the lives of their babies. Viewers hone in, fascinated as families yell and scream, cry and blame. Millions of dollars are made from people’s pain. From watching the lost.

What does it mean to be lost? Spiritually, it means to have lost a connection to the compass of life that is God, to be going in the wrong direction. To sin literally means to miss the mark in the ancient Hebrew, so there is a sense that anyone who is hurting others or leading a life filled with mistakes is essentially lost from God, they do not know the way home so they wander in a land that is waste and misery, holding onto things that will not bring them peace. And the farther we wander from God’s presence, the greater the chaos and pain that we produce.

Why does the sheep wander away from the fold? It is not that the sheep wants to move away from the shepherd, it is that they become distracted, lured by a scent or a curiosity, and then they find that they have lost their way, lost their sense of direction. There are many things that can distract us from God, and hurt and hatred are among the most potent distractions.

Jesus ate with tax collectors. In other words, he dined with the IRS. And he dined with prostitutes and criminals. These were the people that scare us and make our skin crawl. These were people who we would think of as bad or even evil. He shared a meal with them, why? Because God does not abandon see the human soul as bad. God sees the human souls as the lost, God seeks them out.

Ben Clance is a deacon here at the Cathedral. Ben goes into the maximum security prisons here in Florida and he talks to the prisoners about God. Ben sees terrible things, things that I cannot mention in this pulpit, but whenever he sees a man mistreat his own body or try to hurt another man, he does not walk away or leave, he says things like, “How dare you treat yourself in this way? How dare you treat me in this way?” Ben is tough and Ben never leaves. He will visit the same men for months and years, and some of them still refuse his love, they still refuse his company, they want nothing to do with communion. But some turn around and begin to wonder, and others turn their lives around.

Ben calls prison The Belly of the Beast and for ten years he has been going in there, bringing communion to the lost. He seeks out the truth that lies deep within them. Is it still there? Is there some glimpse of God’s light that can be found in this man who has been locked up for life? Is there anything left to seek?

When a man is being executed, Ben goes and washes his feet. He seeks out their goodness, hoping to find some part of them that is willing to be found and to be forgiven.

But you don’t have to be in prison to be lost, and you don’t have to be half-crazy either. Sometimes we all are lost. Sometimes everyone of us wonders if there is any point to our lives at all. When I think back to Sept 11, 2001, I feel lost. I think of the people who joined hands to jump from the windows of skyscrapers and what it must have felt like to hurl through the air knowing that your life would end in a breath, and I feel helpless.

My brother is a surgeon and he rushed to the hospital in New York City that morning. He was ready to have some direction, something to do to help, and no one came in. It was empty. Because everyone was dead and he felt lost.

There are moments in all of our lives when we cannot see the way forward and we don’t know which way to turn. We wonder if the decisions that we have made in life have been the best decisions, we wonder where we would be if we had done things differently. And we don’t know which way to go.

The Psalmist writes You look for truth deep within me.

God actively seeks out the lost, searching hard. In fact, if the parables that Jesus tells us today are right, God looks harder for the lost than He does for those who are on the right track. To get lost is to ensure that God will focus harder on us, not to glory in our brokenness but to find us and help us find our way home.

If you feel at your wits end, saddened by the state of the world and unclear about how to help, God is looking for you.

If you feel aimless and unsure about your future, God is looking for you.

If you feel that there might not be a God, and maybe this is all a sham, God is looking for you.

With the intensity of a blood hound, God is moving closer to you in your darkest moments, the moments when you feel that God is nowhere to be found. There God is, searching.

And we are called to be like God, to search for the broken and the lost. When you look around this morning, when you go to coffee hour or offer someone the peace, look for the person who seems lost. Don’t just greet your friends. Find those who have no friends and let them know that you are there.

And when you wake up on Monday morning, walk in the steps of Jesus. Seek out the man who sits alone on the side of the road with no place to sleep. Even if you are afraid that he will ask you for money, say hello. Speak to him and look him in the eyes. Find him and see him, even if all that you can say to him is to give him directions to the shelter.

We Christians are not placed on this earth to just enjoy life. We are called to follow the Shepherd and that means walking into the brokenness of the world and offering food. That means looking for the lost and helping them find their way home.

This is your home. This altar here, where you are fed every week. This is your anchor, your resting place, so that you may go out into the world and do the work of the Shepherd. Each week you kneel down together, rich and poor and you are fed.

I have never seen someone more lost than the man who lost his wife of 50 years. We had to nearly carry him through the funeral, for he could hardly walk. He was like a lost child, like a baby, he could not hear a word I said, so I just put my arm around him as the coffin was lowered into the earth, and then I took him to get something to eat.

When a baby is lost and afraid, it cries. When it needs to be comforted, it will put something in its mouth. That is what God is doing here, God puts something in your mouth because when the rubber hits the road and we face death and the meaning of life itself, we are all lost. We are all infants, facing something so unknown that it frightens us beyond imagining. So God puts something on our tongues, God feeds us. God finds us. Again and again and again, God seeks you out and God finds you.

Overhearing the Gospel

2010-09-06T21:29:00.000-04:00

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple, Jesus said.

Herbert O Driscoll was walking in an old cemetery years ago. He heard voices on the other side of an old stone wall. The wall divided one area of the cemetery from the other. The voices were speaking softly and he found himself listening.

An old man was explaining something to a boy. He was explaining death and how his son, the boys father, could still love them even though he had died. The old man explained everything with deliberate carefulness, gently, calmly. And the boy continued to ask questions. “But can my dad hear me, grandpa?”

“Yes, dear, he can hear you.”

“But is his body in the ground?”

“Yes, but his soul rests with God.”

“Is he asleep?”

“No, he is very much awake, I think.”

“Why did he die?”

“I wish I new, my love. I wish I knew.”

And lastly, the boy asked, “Is God mad at me?”

And the old man said, “Oh, no. God loves you so much, even though this is hard.”

O’Driscoll said that he felt that he was overhearing something so intimate that he should not be listening. And yet, on the other hand, he somehow felt that he was meant to hear it, all of it, all of the pain and the love.

He walked on, his feet moving through the thick grass of the cemetery, and something came to him. I have just overheard the gospel, he thought to himself.

For years he would ponder what it means to overhear the gospel. Not to just hear it, but to overhear it. You see, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we are overhearing conversations that Jesus had with particular people in a particular time and place. And yet, the gospels were written for us to hear. The writers wanted us to know what Jesus said, how Jesus acted. They knew that coming to know Jesus would change our lives. They knew that he was talking to us too. God meant for us to overhear the gospel. God meant for us to listen to Jesus’ conversations across time and space, through years of stone buildings and churches, and to hear his voice as if from far away. God means for us to hear it and God means for us to listen.

Today’s gospel is disturbing. There is no way around it. It is just plain disturbing.

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple, Jesus said.

I looked up the Greek word for hate. That is what I do whenever the gospel makes no sense to me, I look up the Greek word and often it means so much more than what the English translation means. But I’m afraid that I ran into a dead end in the Greek. Miseo does mean hate. It also means ignoring or letting go. But its primary meaning is to hate. There is no way of getting around that. Jesus chose to use a very strong word.

Does that mean that I am supposed to beat up my mother-in-law or abandon my children in order to be a disciple? That makes no sense to me. Does Jesus mean for families to be broken up or to ignore one another? That does not seem to make sense given the entirety of Jesus’ teaching. Jesus told us to love one another. Jesus took care of his mother when he was dying on the cross. He made sure that John, his beloved disciple, would take care of her. He loved her. So what was he saying here?

It is vital to remember that we are overhearing the gospel here. We are hearing a conversation that was taking place between Jesus and a crowd of people. This crowd had just blitzed him on the countryside. There he was, walking along, when they came up to him, a huge number of them, and said that they would like to be disciples. They had no preparation, no knoweledge, they just walked up to him and said that they wanted to follow. Jesus knew that they had no idea what they were asking.

Are you willing to leave everyone that you love behind? Are you willing to have everyone in your family convinced of your insanity? Are you ready to abandon everyone for me? You have to be willing to abandon your family to come with me. I don’t think that you have any idea what you are asking.

Jesus was willing to give up having a family, having a home, making money… Every normal kind of life comfort was denied to him because he chose to travel the countryside telling people about God. Did they want to follow him? They had no idea what they were asking.

So what is Jesus saying to us? Does he want us to leave our families or hate our relatives? Or are we supposed to give up everything that we own, as he asked the young rich man to do? What would Jesus say to us?

Jesus was responding to the presumptuousness and pride of the crowd, just like he responded to the pride of the wealthy young man who thought that he was the perfect disciple. Jesus was trying to tell all of these people that they can do nothing if they are proud of themselves and they can do nothing if God is not their first priority.

If you want to follow Jesus, you will be asked to leave everything behind. Everything.

So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Jesus did not call everyone to walk with him. He did not call Mary or Martha or Lazarus. He did not call the Samaritan woman or Jairus or the centurion. And yet he loved every one of them. Jesus knew that the call to abandon family was reserved for only a few.

But for all of us, regardless of whether we become monks or faithful family members, if you cannot put God ahead of everything that you love and value, then you cannot be a disciple. God must come first.

Which is why you and I need to practice putting Jesus first. Ironically, you cannot have a successful marriage if you love your spouse more than you love God. And you cannot be a successful parent if you love your child more than you love God. For if you put any of your family members over and above God, you will distort your relationship. It will become idolatrous, for you will have put your loved one in the place of God. You will hold on too hard, and you and your loved ones will suffer.

The only One who is capable of being your first priority without disappointment and without dysfunction, is God. And ironically, to love God first means to love everything else more fully.

Let me say that again, to love God means to love everything else more fully.

Jesus may have put God ahead of his family, but in the end he loved all of us more than any of us had ever been loved before. We all became his family. His love was made perfect because he loved God first and foremost, and all other relationships became reflections of his love for God.

There will come a day when Christ will call you to follow him. For many of us, it happens quietly over the course of our lifetimes. For all of us who love him, it will happen when we die. Jesus will come to us and he will hold out his hand and, if we are to take his hand, we must leave everything else behind: our stuff, our families, everything. There will be nothing else to hold onto but his hand.

In Kansas, a new couple joined our parish. They had been married for over 50 years and they were so loving. They had just retired and were planning to travel together when Wayne came down with stomach cancer. His wife was devastated and mad at God. He quickly began to wither under the chemo and was soon on hospice care. She became more and more angry. When I visited their home, she would be lying in his bed, literally holding onto him, telling him that she did not want him to die.

He lingered in great pain for weeks and weeks. I urged her to give him permission to die, she could not do it.

In the middle of the night, after three weeks of dying, he sat up in bed. He had not spoken for three days and had seemed comatose. He spoke in a loud voice, clear as a bell…

Jean, I am going… Horray! Horray!

And he lay down and died.

She could not believe that he had said Horray. He had never used that word before. And there was such a look of ecstasy on his face. She knew that he was going to Someone who could love him and show him beauty that she could not show him. He was gone.

I see over and over people getting stuck in their lives because they are living for another person instead of for God. Expectations and attachments to our loved ones cripple our lives and make us less than we could be. Don’t put your loved ones in front of God or you will hurt them and you will hurt yourself.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And everything else will come from that.

Joseph of Genesis

2010-08-19T08:26:00.000-04:00

It happened one Sunday in church. I had just finished the announcements when a voice came over the sound system. “THIS IS GOD.” I stood there, dumbfounded. I was just about to say the offertory sentence. It was just three words, but clear as a bell. “THIS IS GOD.” Was it really God? I had prayed for years for God to be present with us in worship. If it was God, I was not so sure that I wanted Him to be so vocal. He didn’t have a place in the liturgy. And, sadly, I found myself doubting that it actually was God. My first thought was that a drunk man had grabbed a mic. “Lord, please help me,” I thought in that one moment of dumbstruck silence. The congregation was looking at me as if to see what I was going to do.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. And I turned around and walked to the altar. I was sure that God would speak again, but he didn’t. Turns out one of the Senior High youth was playing with the sound system in the fellowship hall. “THIS IS GOD,” is what he chose to say into the mic before a usher raced down the hall to turn it off.

I have thought about that incident a lot mainly because I am ashamed. It turned out that I didn’t want God to distrupt the liturgy or alter my life. I said that I wanted God there, I told him that I wanted him here, but in reality, my first response was panic. Because in that moment, I understood that God might mean messiness and even disruption and I was not sure that I wanted that. Not a struggle, not a surprise. I only wanted God if he brought me joy and comfort, prosperity as I understood it. I did not want God to interrupt things or make things hard.

The Scripture says that the Lord was with Joseph. The Lord was with Joseph, it reads plainly. But instead of prosperity and success, the Lord’s presence means that Joseph gets into a mess. First, he is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers and then, in today’s reading, he is framed by the wife of his master. She desires him and pursues him, but when he rightfully refuses, she frames him, lies and has him thrown in prison. For someone who had the Lord on his side, life sure didn’t seem to be so good for Joseph. He was listening. He was faithful. He does not lie or cheat and yet, he suffers and is treated unfairly. Life with God is no picnic for Joseph.

A few days ago, I was walking through our bookstore when I glanced up and saw two copies of The Prayer of Jabez. The Prayer of Jabez is one of my least favorite books. I considered buying both copies and throwing them away, but then my conscience got the best of me. Who am I to censure books? Could I put up a sign that said Dean’s LEAST favorite book, read at your own risk!? In the end, I decided that, as Episcopalians, I should encourage you to think for yourselves and read even that which I find wrong, for God gave you all minds and I am not your pope but rather your advisor and your guide in your relationships with God. So the book stayed on the shelf. But here is why I dislike it so much.

The Prayer of Jabez is a best-selling book about how to become rich. Basically, the premise of the book is this: if you pray hard enough and invite God into your life, you will be successful and happy. And of course, if you are unhappy or unsuccessful, you must not have invited God in. So God’s presence is equated with comfort, wealth and abundance. And that must mean that all who suffer don’t know God.

It’s rubbish! God was with joseph and he suffered! God was with Jesus and he gave himself up to the greatest agony known to man. The presence of God does not automatically bring joy and peace and wealth and prosperity. In fact, I call that kind of thinking The Prosperity Gospel. It is a lie. God does not bring success or comfort or money to those who he loves. Sometimes, those who God loves suffer even more than those who do not love God. Listen to Jesus today. Does Jesus say that it is easy to follow him? Does he talk about getting wealthy or having a good time? He talks about ripping us apart! He talks about swords and parents being ripped from their children. There is nothing nice or comfortable or successful about what Jesus says. He talks about hardship and pain! Why is it that we can’t listen?!

Sometimes God asks things of us that are hard and painful. Sometimes, people become ill or are involved in accidents and it is not God’s doing at all, but the result of the fallen nature of our world. Those who love God and invite God into their lives are not rewarded with prosperity. But what we are rewarded with is God’s presence itself, and strength to make it through the days ahead. And deep down inside your heart, no matter how hard your life may be, to serve God is to know a great and profound joy. To be used for God’s purposes may be painful, but it is also the greatest joy known to humankind.

When Joseph is framed and thrown in prison, most people would have asked themselves why God abandoned them. Joseph did not ask such a question. Instead he walked the path that lay before him, a path that took him from favor and the love of his father to slavery and prison. He walked the path that lay before him, continuing to listen and pray, even in the midst of great failure and injustice. For he seemed to know that God had a larger plan.

When you and I are children, we dream of doing great and powerful things. We dream of becoming President of the United States or curing cancer. But when the reality of life begins to roll upon us, we realize that we are lucky to pay all the bills and live to a ripe old age. We find that our loved ones die or suffer and we do not have the kind of job we once dreamed of. Some of us are unemployed, some never quite found their passion in life. Some struggle to be perfect parents and find that they are always failing. And we realize how insignificant our lives have become, that we have not changed the world, but we are just trying our best. And we wonder if we went wrong somewhere along the line.

But God is present in the insignificant details, in the smallest of moments when we say a kind word to someone. And God is present in our wanderings and even in our failures, especially in our failures. God does wonders with us when we struggle.

God needed Joseph to fail and remain faithful. That was part of the plan. Not greatness, not at least right now, but just faithfulness in the midst of a cruel and unfair world.

A few years ago, a television series ran that had great implications about faith and our relationships with God. It was called Joan of Arcadia. The show was about a teenage girl who is struggling with high school when God shows up and starts talking to her. God appears to speak to her through people that surround her. Sometimes God is a cleaning lady, sometimes a mailman or a fellow kid at school. At first, she thinks she has gone crazy, then she realizes that it really is God and that when she follows God’s advice, she helps people.

The prom is approaching at her high school and Joan is hoping that the guy she likes will ask her. God appears as a punk-rock senior and tells her that she is to ask a boy to the prom. “Do you have to meddle in my love life?” she says. (Joan has this way of talking back to God that is both bold and kind of stubborn but it makes for great scenes and she always ends up doing what God asks of her.) Joan asks who the guy is that she is supposed to take. God points to a young guy named Russell. He is overweight and a complete loser. He has no friends and seems to be always angry. He wears a black leather jacket. Joan is appalled. She yells at God and complains, but she does it. She walks up to Russell in the middle of the hallway and asks him to the prom. He seems startled, but he says yes.

The prom with Russell is a nightmare. He sneaks in booze and tries to get her to drink, then they leave the dance and drive to an abandoned parking lot where Russell pulls out a gun and begins to shoot cans. Joan is terrified and demands that he take her home when the cops pull up and Russell is arrested for disturbing the peace.

The next day at school, God shows up as the punk rocker again and Joan is furious! ‘Why did you make me take him!” she yells. ‘I had a horrible time. It was a nightmare. It was dangerous and he seemed miserable too. I completely failed.” No, says God, you did exactly what I asked of you. Let me show you what would have happened if you hadn’t asked Russell to the prom. God then takes her back to the day when she asked Russell. When she walked up to him in the hall, Russell was carrying a gun. He was planning to shoot two of the football players, a teacher and then himself. All this was averted simply because Joan asked him to the dance. She gave him something to hope for.

I did not ask you to be perfect, just to be there for him, God says.

Sometimes, when we listen to God and allow God into our lives, we expect to do great things, to make a huge impact on the world and be successful in some way. But we do not see what God sees and sometimes just our faithful presence in the midst of suffering is all that God wants of us. Sometimes we are called to walk the walk, or as it says in the book of Hebrews, to run the race that is set before us. And we will not know what God had in mind until the finish line.

We forget that Joseph was a complete failure before he was ever great. But for better or worse, his response was always faithfulness and obedience, and that is why we remember him.

Miracles from the Pit

2010-08-09T13:01:00.002-04:00

I just got back from my annual family reunion in Connecticut. When I was a child, it was mandatory. One did not miss it, or my grandmother would, well, I’, not sure what she would do but whatever it was scared us enough never to ask. Nobody ever missed the family reunion.

And each year, my grandmother, God rest her soul, would ask us the infamous question. “Well, dearies, what did you accomplish this year?” Unwittingly, she pitted her grandchildren against one another. Who was going to the best colleges? Who had the best jobs? Who was raising their children well? Without knowing it, she played favorites, comparing us, complaining about our mistakes, reveling in our successes. I got to the point where I felt like going on a diet before the family reunion just so that I didn’t get her evil eye. What kind of a vacation is that? Now that she has died, the family has relaxed so much. We don’t dress up for dinner. We laugh and cry and eat and act silly. God bless my grandmother. I did love her but she etched competition into my skull.

Joseph was a favorite in a family where his father played favorites. And their competition was not just for a once-a-year family reunion. Joseph lived with his competitors all the time. Joseph was one of twelve brothers, born of four different mothers. All four of the mothers were in constant competition with one another so it is no surprise that there was near constant rivalry going on all the time among their sons. It must have been an intense atmosphere to grow up in. Joseph was younger than most of his brothers. By the time the Biblical story begins, he is seventeen and most of his brothers are grown men. Joseph’s mother was his father’s favorite wife, so Joseph became his favorite son. Joseph’s father gave him a coat with long sleeves, which would protect him from the sun. An obvious sign of favor, this coat enrages his brothers. The competition rises to a feverish pitch and soon his brothers want him dead.

Have you ever read the book Lord of the Flies? It is a must read for anyone raising boys. A gang of boys are shipwrecked on an island without adults. They gradually become wild, reduced to their baser natures without any supervision. They begin to bully one small boy. The bullying goes unchecked and eventually becomes violent. In the end, they kill the smaller boy. It is a horrible story about the cruel realities of young men when rivalry goes unchecked.

Couple competition with numerous unsupervised young men and you soon get Lord of the Flies. With no adults around, Joseph’s brothers become ugly when he boasts of a dream that he had in which they bowed down to him. Joseph was either so innocent as to trust his dreams or so naïve as to be unsuspecting of the depth of his brothers hatred. They are about to kill him when one brother gets a conscience and intervenes. As an alternative, they decide to throw him into a pit.

It must have been incredibly dark in that hole. Israel has a very dry climate. Joseph could have died of thirst or starvation. Maybe he thought that it was a practical joke at first, that his brothers would relent, cool down and change their minds. But they did not.

When slave traders approach, Joseph’s brothers decide to sell him as a slave.

Thus, in an instant, the favored boy is reduced to slavery. Bound by ropes, he is dragged to a foreign land to work himself to death.

This is the beginning of a three-part sermon series on the life of Joseph. Why? Because he was a man who listened to God. In my first year as your Dean, together, we are trying to determine God’s will for the future of this church here in downtown Jacksonville. It is time for us to listen, and Joseph is going to help us learn how. When listening to God, there is no better place to start than with the stories of Scripture.

From all human perspectives, Joseph’s life just about ended in this passage today. He went from prosperity and favor to slavery and poverty. He lost everything and not through some random tragedy but through the betrayal of his family members, the people who were supposed to love him the most. Joseph was at a dead end

Life could have ended for him that day, but it did not. The reason his life did not end was because he never stopped listening. He believed that God could make something from the bottom of a pit. And he was right.

In all the best stories of Scripture, there is a dead end: a death, a crises, a loss. In all these stories, life never seems to go as we would have chosen. And yet, God seems to do his best work at the bottom of a pit. The dead end is resurrection time.

Be awake, Jesus says in today’s gospel. Be awake and aware, for you do not know when God will come. You must be willing to follow him, even in the middle of the darkest night.

If Joseph had not been betrayed by those who loved him, he would not have served God in the magnificent way that he did. If he had not suffered, he might never have listened to God with the intensity that he did. Joseph let God run his life. Later, as a prosperous ruler in Egypt, he would literally save his family from starvation. Every Savior must die to himself before being truly able to save. And every one of us must stare at the walls of a dead end before God can wake us up to truly listen.

I have been learning a lot about our neighborhood here in the heat of downtown Jacksonville. A lot of people think that we are nowhere. No one comes here. This church is no longer on a main drag. Downtown has suffered. How many times have I heard people say, ‘I just don’t go down there anymore!” Or “I remember when we used to go downtown to shop and work, remember that?” People want to know what it’s like downtown, as if I have moved to the Sahara desert. “Is it dangerous?” they ask…

The new Courthouse is nearing completion. Soon many of the lawyers will move their offices from this district to be closer to the new courthouse. What will happen to this corner of downtown? Will we become a place of abandoned properties and half-way houses? It feels as if we are hitting a dead end.

Alleluia. Sounds like just the right time for God to become intimately involved. I believe that we were all called here to this dead end of downtown for a reason. If this Cathedral does not care for this district, no one will. God is giving us a call here, folks, I am convinced of it.

And another thing, I am almost at the point where I want to put up a huge bill board that says, “Where would Jesus be?” with a picture of the heart of downtown. He would be here! I am convinced of it. He worships with us every Sunday.

Joseph saw some hard days in the service of God. He was framed and imprisoned, he was left to rot in jail. By many accounts, his life was a mess. And yet God kept raising him to new heights, using his misfortune to make him wiser and to get him where he needed to go.

I say that the poverty and homelessness around us tell us one thing as a Cathedral- that we are exactly where we are supposed to be. This is our time to impact this city. And as we listen, vision is taking shape.

I knew a woman who was one of the best psychologists in town. Everyone respected her. Her practice was full for she could be so genuinely loving and so very tough all at the same time. As a member of my parish years ago, she told me that she had suffered from massive clinical depression for years. It got so bad that she could not go to work, but lay in her bed under her blankets all day. Her husband was terrified and did not know what to do. She would lie there alone in the dark, wishing that she would simply cease to exist. After months of suffering that continued despite the best of medical care, she awoke in the middle of the night in the pit of darkness and something happened. Even years later, she had trouble putting the experience in words. Peace was a word she used. The peace that passes all understanding. A feeling of such beauty and deep joy came to her. And it altered her life forever. She got out of bed. She ate. Her life began.

“It took me years to understand that I had to experience that darkness in order to help people the way that I do. I had to see the pit in order to know the grace of God, in order to know what it means to be lifted up, to be saved. I understand salvation now. I really understand.”

God has us here in the heart of downtown for a reason my friends. There is a reason for all of this. This city is our greatest struggle and it is our greatest opportunity. For it is here that we need a Savior. It is here that we can find Christ and be saved.

Amen.

Thy Kingdom Come

2010-07-28T09:55:00.000-04:00

Perry Smith, our Canon for Pastoral Care here at the Cathedral, is writing a memoir. This week, he gave me a draft of the first few chapters. And I was rivoted. Get ready for the publication of something terrific. I could not put it down.

Perry’s life has taken some incredible turns. It is only now, as he writes this memoir, that he has begun to recognize the way that God has woven together his life and called him from boyhood to become a priest. But you would never believe what he has done and where he has been along the path to his vocation. He was a bullfighter, a trappist Monk with Thomas Merton, a Vietnam Veteran, and FBI agent and finally a priest. And all through this incredible journey, God was forming him. It is an incredible story.

When I was in high school, I thought that I was going to be the next Meryl Streep. I took every drama class that I could sign up for. In my senior year, I signed up for a class on movement and drama. The teacher was this shy man named Mr. Coons. At the beginning of every class, he would gather us together in an old gym and we would stretch. He told us to find a place for ourselves out on the floor of the gym, to spread out from one another, so that we could move and dance. He always kept the harsh florescent lights turned off and there was this spot out on the floor of sunlight, where the early afternoon sun shone through a sky light in the ceiling to make a perfect circle of brightness on the floor. Every week, I wanted to plant myself right under that skylight, but every week, I got shy and moved off somewhere in the dim light to do my warm ups. I wondered what it would be like to dance in that brightness, but I was embarrassed to call attention to myself so I shied away.

Jesus teaches us the Lord’s prayer today. The greatest of all Christian prayers, the Lord’s Prayer is so profound, so rich. Its words have remained intact through the centuries. Whereas the Nicene Creed and other statements and prayers have been dissected and put back together, the Lord’s prayer slips like liquid through the disputes of the centuries and remains today a symbol of the beauty and majesty of God. It is simply too holy to be messed with. Jesus himself spoke this prayer and, although it differs a bit between the gospels of Luke and Matthew, its major elements remain the same.

I would like to speak to you about one phrase in the Lord’s Prayer.

Thy Kingdom Come.

Jesus told us to say to God, Thy Kingdom Come. Thy Kingdom Come. What was he trying to say?

There were a lot more kingdoms in Jesus’ day than there are today. A kingdom was an area of land that was governed by a king or monarch. It was a place where the laws were created and enforced by the king and no one else. It was a straightforward place, really. There was one ruler and all others were subservient. The kingdom would be either a glorious and good place or a bad and cruel place depending on the ruler. Thus a kingdom of God would be a place where God was in charge, where God made the rules and we all followed them. Since God is inherently good, God’s kingdom would be a land with peace and harmony beyond anything that humans could muster. Even our times of greatest prosperity and peace would be no match for God’s kingdom, for the ruler of God’s kingdom would not be broken and would institute justice and righteousness like we have never seen.

Today we have lost the notion of kingdom. When we think of rulers we think of Queen Elizabeth, lovely and very wealthy but otherwise just a figurehead with no real authority. And those lands that are still ruled by one person tend to be places of violence and poverty or at least great inequality between the rich and the poor. The only positive use of the word kingdom is now to be found in fairy tales, or the Magic Kingdom of Disney. So our language and our understanding have shifted away from the word Kingdom and The Kingdom of God means little to us.

We often take the kingdom of God to mean heaven and by that we mean the place that we go after we die. A destination, the result of a good life of prayer and service. A place of beauty and peace that is beyond this world and cannot be reached except when we die. But this is a misunderstanding. Jesus clearly stated that the kingdom of God was near and he wanted to pray for it to come, not when we die but NOW. He wanted the Kingdom of God to come here NOW. On earth AS IN heaven.

Since language is always evolving, it is necessary for us to revisit the translation of the words Kingdom of God. I have a new translation to offer and it is this…

The God Dimension.

It strikes me that Jesus was talking about a realm of God that already exists but that people were not somehow able to access. It was like having the best computer game but not downloading it. We were living in a half-life, not allowing the God dimension to illumine us. Without allowing the kingdom of God to come, we were only half alive.

The concept of dimensions has only recently been discovered. Scientists are aware of three dimensions that we can see. The fourth dimension is considered to be time. But what about beyond that? Could there be dimensions that exist right now, right here, but that are somehow beyond our perception?

In my high school drama class, there came a day when I took a chance. When Mr. Coons asked us to spread out and begin to dance and stretch, I went to the sunlight. I stood there, in the middle of the circle of light and began to reach upwards. The air itself was full of the tiny particles that you can only see when you are standing in direct sunlight. I was not able to see anyone else around me for the light was so bright that it blinded me from comparing myself to others or even contemplating embarrassment. I danced and it was so beautiful. I caught a glimpse of the God dimension.

The God dimension slips into our lives from time to time, even without our invitation. It comes to us in moments of beauty or when we look into the face of someone we love. It comes to us when we hear music that lifts our hearts. It comes to us in worship. And it comes to us in silence. And once you have tasted the God dimension, the presence of God among us, you want that presence all the time and that is when you start praying in earnest

Thy Kingdom come.

Thy Dimension come.

That is when you and I can begin to say, God, you must lead me. You must come to me. I know that you are already here, already present in the fifth or tenth dimension, your dimension, but come to me, open my eyes, that I may see you.

As one saint said, God is already here. Don’t seek God, SEE GOD.

This past week, I had the privilege of visiting Barbara Davis in the assisted living facility. Many of you know Barbara, she is a long-standing, very faithful member of the Cathedral and spent years serving in our Sacristy Guild and preparing the altar for worship. She is now bedridden and cannot come to church. Our Lay Eucharistic ministers bring her communion regularly. She has the look of one who is living in the God dimension. Light shines from her eyes. Let me share with you what she said to me.

“Sometimes I get frustrated because I cannot walk, but then I realize that I need to follow God. Whenever I have tried to do life my way, I have ended up making a mess. When I step out in front of Jesus, then I can’t see him or follow him because I have put myself first. So I step back into his presence, letting him lead me so that I can see his light and follow his path for me. He presses upon me and guides me, not with words but with his patient presence.”

God waits for you in the God dimension and you can access God NOW. Simply step into the light. Ask God to come, say

Thy Kingdom Come.

And then realize how God has been there from the very beginning, weaving the pieces of your life together like a beautiful tapestry, bringing you here to this very moment, along with a former FBI agent and a new Dean and so many other incredible people. God has been waiting for you to awaken to his eternal presence with you.

Cathedral Witness

2010-07-19T13:17:00.000-04:00

Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

                                                                                    Matthew 28:20

     It is nearly five am American time and I have been up most of the night. I have just boarded the airplane on the way home from England, where the choir of our Cathedral is in residence at Ely. I have spent the past five days visiting some of the most beautiful Cathedrals in the world and listening to sacred music.

     I picked up New Yorker article on the way home. Once more, a brilliant writer questions the topic of Jesus’ divinity. With eloquence and charm, he winds his way around the usual arguments of how the gospels must have been written many years after Jesus’ life and not in his native language. He wonders if Jesus was a stoneworker rather than a carpenter and aptly suggests that “Verily I say unto you” may just mean “Look, listen up!” and that the “Son of Man” might just mean “one of us guys.” The arguments are solid and I have heard them all before. They are good intellectual fodder and most of us Anglicans have pondered them all in depth. After all, if we claim that you don’t have to check your brain at the door to be Anglican, then we must entertain these arguments and consider them seriously. They are not threatening to faith, they are just part and parcel of it. It is necessary to wrestle with such thoughts. One can’t help but consider them.

     However,all the rational arguments in the world pale in the face of the majestic beauty of the Cathedrals that I have just witnessed. Pictures of Jesus’ life and the stories of his miracles, crucifixion and resurrection, shine forth in stained glass windows and their light penetrates across the centuries. How could a simple peasant, a stone-cutter or carpenter or rabbi, how could that simple person ever have had such lasting effects across the centuries without the presence of God? God’s presence in Christ is the only way that I can make sense of the beauty that lay before my eyes. God’s presence is the only plausible reason why humans would build a Cathedral so high and so lofty that they would die before seeing it completed. Only God Himself could engender that kind of selfless devotion. Only the Incarnation of God who did, in fact, rise from the dead.

At the highest point of Ely’s Cathedral, sculpted into the ceiling, is a painted carving of Jesus.  He is blessing all of us. He looks down upon the entire vast expanse of the chancel and nave with a smile on his face, as if to say, Bless you all, down there. I am watching over you.

The Push for Independence

2010-07-04T22:42:00.002-04:00

My father-in-law died eight years ago. He was a remarkable man, a Methodist Minister in Tennessee. He served as a University chaplain during the Civil Rights movement in Memphis. He spoke out on civil rights and his family was threatened numerous times. My husband was just a little boy at the time. My father-in-law would wear a collar and a black cross hung around his neck when he marched.

Dr. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. The next morning, the city exploded. My father-in-law, along with the Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral and some other clergy, planned to march down Poplar Avenue, which is the main drag in Memphis, right to city hall to protest the assassination and the violence. The Dean of the Cathedral, at the spur of the moment, took the cross that stood on the altar at the Cathedral and carried it, leading the march.

The crowds were enormous. People were screaming and throwing things at the marchers. Slowly, the civil rights activists walked down the street, their numbers swelling. They sang. They prayed. Sometimes they yelled.

My father-in-law was walking by a house when something happed which he would never forget. He would tell the story over and over for years to come. There was this old woman sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair. When she saw the protesters approaching, she rocked back and forth, back and forth. As they neared, she stood up and began to scream. It took my father-in-law a moment to distinguish what she was saying. As he drew closer, her voice came to him loud and clear. And this is what she shouted,

YOU GET THAT CROSS BACK IN THE CHURCH WHERE IT BELONGS!

What in the world was she thinking? I think that woman really preferred to keep Jesus in a building. She wanted Jesus contained, controlled. Stay in church to encounter God and when you leave church, don’t expect to meet God anywhere. Keep that cross sheltered and safe. But that is so wrong. So wrong. In fact, Jesus was the exact opposite.

Jesus did not have a home and he did not expect any of us to sit still either. He did not hold training sessions or orientation. He did not fully prepare his followers for what they would encounter once they stepped out of his presence. Those who worked for him had no safety net, no salary, no security. Unless you were a part of his very small group of disciples, as soon as you knew and loved Jesus, he would send you away. There was no hanging out with Jesus, no simply being together. Immediately, he moved and he made you move. He sends us out. Doesn’t that just stink? There is no hanging around, enjoying his presence. He wants you out, pounding the pavement, walking the streets, working to bring others to him.

In today’s gospel, Jesus sends out seventy people. They have not been with him long, since he just started his ministry in the gospel of Luke. They have had no time for extensive training. Jesus did not create a manual or a study guide. No sooner had he chosen them than he just pushed them onward, without him. He wanted them to be independent and courageous. He told them, point black, that he was sending them out into dangerous situations, that people might reject them or even do violence to them. “I am sending you out like lambs in the midst of wolves,” he said. They were not to pack anything or bring food, weapons, nothing. Just go, two by two, independent, on their own.

What a mess they could have made out there. It is surprising that Jesus does so little to prepare them. I guess that he expected that they would learn as they went. He tells them in no uncertain terms that they are representing him and that they are to tell people that the kingdom of heaven is near. But they must have made so many mistakes! It must have been so scary for them. They had no idea what they were getting into.

It is amazing to realize that Jesus did not hold on to his disciples. He wanted them on their own, independent of him, doing his work. Maybe he knew that he would best be with them when they were out in the world serving him.

Are you willing to work for God here in this country in 2010? The pay is lousy, but the eternal benefits are amazing! If you are willing, don’t expect to sit still. God wants you out on your own, independent and courageous, trying new things, meeting new people. God does not go in for comfort. If you are to work for God, you must take the cross out of the church where it belongs.

Today is July 4th and we are in a tenuous time in this nation. Our economy is struggling. The oil devastation in the Gulf is beyond anything that we can fathom. Technology is raging ahead and we are frightened. Some are afraid that America’s heyday is over, that we are on the decline and that nations such as India and China are on the rise. Our fear causes us to become more and more divided, blaming the mistakes of this nation on others, unwilling to look at ourselves. In our fear and anxiety, we risk losing the independence and creativity that have made us so great. Independence takes courage and it breeds ingenuity.

The founders of this country put their necks on the line and created a new form of government in which the people could choose their own leadership. It was a bold, innovative new way of thinking and living. It was risky – stepping out into that vast unknown. Our Founders were like lambs going out into the midst of wolves, they had no idea what their bold experiment would ultimately produce. They were trying to envision something greater than what had been done before, a form of government that would respect the hopes, dreams and opinions of each individual, but they had never walked this way before. Everything was new and everything was risky. It took great bravery.

My friends, we are in a new era, and we need to become independent innovators once more. I believe that God is calling us to that. This country is brilliant. There is no reason why we cannot discover alternatives to fossil fuels, solve our financial crisis, and improve the lives of all of our citizens. It is scary, but it can be done. It will take great bravery.

Likewise, the church must be innovative once more. We are called to step out of our comfort zone, and reach a world where “anything goes” is the name of the game, and uncertainty is rampant. Where it doesn’t matter what you believe. The church must once again speak and teach and lead with authority. It will take great bravery.

Years ago, I was in Russia trying to research the Orthodox Church, but I was scared to speak to a priest. I would go to the same church Sunday after Sunday and not speak to him. I was too shy, too scared. I didn’t know if I spoke the language well enough, if I was smart enough. I thought he might laugh at me. One morning, I brought a Russian friend to church with me. She saw my struggle and she did something. After the service, as I stood watching the priest greet people, not daring to go and speak to him, she came up behind me and pushed me. She just gave me a shove.

That push made me so mad. How dare she push me towards him? Maybe I wasn’t ready yet. Maybe I needed more time. I was not fully prepared. But I did walk up to that priest and speak to him and that began a new part of my journey.

Sometimes, we need a shove. I believe that God is giving us a push today here in Jacksonville. Here on this Fourth of July in the year 2010, God is telling us to get out there again, to try new things, to be brave and courageous and to step into the future without having it all together. Jesus asked his followers to step out so many years ago and he asks us to step out now. To stop complaining and fighting and blaming and worrying and to walk down our own streets carrying the cross before us, striving to build a better world, affirming justice, equality, and liberty, speaking of God’s kingdom – all for the love of Jesus .

Get that cross OUT OF THE CHURCH where it belongs!

The Flesh and The Spirit

2010-07-02T21:55:00.003-04:00

I stink at exercise. Every morning, I get up and my dog, Ella, who is just one and a half, is already itching to go. I rub my eyes and feel sorry for myself as I get ready to take her on a jog, or you might call it a slog. She pulls like crazy, running me. Most days I do run for about 20 minutes at a kind of a slow pace. Some days I just walk fast. The trees and the air wake me up. I begin to give thanks to God for a new day, to pray, maybe a song runs through my head.

And then I see someone coming towards me. Another woman my age, and she is really running. All of a sudden, I pick up my pace. I try to look really in shape, like I am going for miles and miles. I smile and say hello. Then, once she is out of range, I slog again. I come up with the most amazing excuses for why I need to stop running…

It’s not really that good for you, to pound your body into the pavement.

There are really fit people who walk

Maybe I am just too vain

I’ve done enough.

I need to be satisfied with the body I have

I can’t pray as well when I am running

It’s all a bunch of hooey-all the stuff that runs through my mind. I know what this is really about. It’s about my spiritual life. My body is a part of my spiritual life. And if I don’t manage to take care of my flesh, I won’t be able to grow closer to God.

It’s hard to understand the apostle Paul. He wrote these incredibly profound things, but he wrote them in the form of run-on sentences with a density that intimidates most of us. But Paul was the Christian theologian who took what Jesus said and did for us and made some sense of it. He was brilliant and vital and, although he was a bit one-sided, absolutely in-love with God.

In the letter to the Galatians, Paul talks about the relationship of the flesh and the Spirit. We inhabit bodies that God has made and these bodies are important. But our relationship with God far exceeds our bodies. We have a spiritual life that can soar beyond the clouds. The body is holy, it was made by God, but it cannot have the last word, or we will never be free to experience God. The body is like a child that must be given boundaries and discipline, or it will distract us completely from God.

If I did exactly what my body wanted, I would lie in bed most of the day. I would eat Breyers ice cream by the quart and watch stupid romance movies. But I would become depressed and I would feel removed from God over time. So I must haul my body out of bed in the morning and run that hyper dog, not to try to look pretty but to discipline my body so that I can both serve God and grow closer to God.

Back in Kansas, I joined a gym. There was a woman there who was in her sixties. She began to talk to me while we were on the eliptical machines. She had been a beautiful blonde, just a knock-out in her younger years. Her whole identity had been caught up in her body. She dressed immaculately and noticed how both women and men seemed to respect her. Then she began to age. So she injected her skin with botox. Then came her first real face-lift, then second. Both nothing looked as good as it did when she was young. Now, after multiple surgeries, she looked like a plastic specter of herself. And she realized that something was terribly wrong. There must be more to life than just trying to look good. There just had to be more…but she could not escape the slavery that she had created. She was in bondage to her body, exercising madly for hours each day and never satisfied. Each year, it grew worse.

Another woman I knew had been hurt by her father at a tender age, and she wore about two hundred pounds of extra fat. She claimed it was genetic, but every day, she drove by Krispy Kream. She had to get her knees replaced. She was in constant pain. Her slavery to her body was just as great.

If you are to truly follow Christ, to be free, Paul is quite clear that you must liberate yourself from your body. And that means, quite simply, learning what is best for you and saying no. Create a physical rule of life for yourself, find out what you need to do to care for your body enough so that you don’t have to think about it all the time. What would it take to liberate you from your body? Whatever that is, do it.

If you want to be a disciple, you also have to travel light. Remember that when Jesus ushered an invitation for someone to follow Him, he did not wait around. He did not have time for folks who wanted to pack. He did not even have time for the man who wanted to bury his father. He wants you and me and he’s not going to wait around.

Do you have too much stuff? Too much stuff can create another kind of fleshly bondage. Are you enslaved to your home? What do you need to get rid of to liberate yourself? In the eyes of God, your excess really belongs to someone else and it will not serve you, it will only drag you down. I am convinced that this oil spill along with other realizations of our modern world will lead us to begin to value less rather than more. Can you live more simply? Do you know where all of your belongings are? Are there things that you haven’t used in over a year? Give them away. Free your soul from too much stuff. When Jesus comes, you don’t want to be caught packing.

The same holds true of your relationships. Have you said all that you need to say to your loved ones? Do they know how you feel? Make sure that they do, for life is precious and you don’t want to be bound to unresolved issues if you are hit by a car tomorrow.

Strange isn’t it, how the spirit is bound to the physical world? It is only when we handle our physical realities that we can begin to grow in the knowledge and love of the Lord. You cannot begin to truly love God if you are obsessed with your body, your stuff or your relationships. Your mind needs to be freed from obsessing about these things, so handle them, and make room for the most important thing in your life: God.

Picture a playground in the edge of the Grand Canyon. It has wonderful equipment. Any child would want to play, but the parents won’t let their children near it. Why? Because there is no fence and the children could fall off the edge of a cliff. But put in a nice strong, steel fence and the parents will laugh and praise their children as they play. So it is with God. If you and God are worried about your body opr your stuff or your safety or your vulnerability in relationships, you will never be free to truly play with God. And God wants to play with you. God wants to dance with you!

Your Vestry has created a Rule of Life, a statement for how they choose to live each day, attending worship, giving, serving. It is in your bulletin. Read it. Find out what you need to do to be free.

At the base of our altar are the icons that were painted this week here at the Cathedral. Ann Brodt led an Icon painting workshop. In order for God to shine through these icons, the Orthodox have a very disciplined way of painting. You must use a set image. You must pray constantly as you paint, using certain paints and gold leaf. The Holy Spirit flows best through a disciplined practice, for it liberates the mind to seek God.

Strange isn’t it? You must provide structure and discipline to the flesh if you are to experience the depth of God’s love. Size down, travel light. You are too valuable to waste your life focusing on your body or your stuff. You, my friends, are so much more.

Exorcism and the Power of God

2010-06-21T11:36:00.001-04:00

Only one person has ever asked me to perform an exorcism. It was at the blessing of the animals service in October. It was a cool fall afternoon in Wichita, Kansas. A man came up with his dog so that I could give his dog a blessing and a St. Francis medal. He wanted to know if I could perform an exorcism on his dog. I of course refused, after all, the dog only seemed wild, not possessed.

Do you believe in exorcisms? They seem kind of medieval to me. Both medieval and judgmental. If someone asked me to perform one, I would refer them to the Bishop. M Scott Peck writes a book about performing exorcisms. I found it kind of self-congratulatory and strange. Most of us don’t believe that exorcisms are necessary or particularly helpful. And yet, most of us are fascinated with the idea.

In youth groups, I get the question about whether or not I have performed an exorcism, particularly late at night at camp outs this seems to come up. One of the most popular films of my generation was the Exorcist, when Satan inhabits a little girl and she is absolutely terrifying.

We don’t like to talk of possession nowadays, but we are fascinated with the demonic. One of the most popular movies of our day is Twilight and its succeeding films. Based on a book, the story is about a young woman who falls in love with a vampire. Her love affair with a man who is immortal makes a kind of darker teen flick and it is riotously popular, grossing millions of dollars. The plot is simplistic, but there is something about the innocent tangling with darkness that just fascinates people.

On the far side of the Sea of Gallilee, there are some steep hills. This was known as the country of the Gerasenes. And there was a man living there who was possessed.

What is possession? What did people of Jesus’ day define as possession? Back then, there was very little medical knowledge, certainly none of the language that we now use to refer to mental illness or neurological disorders. Someone who had, say, epilepsy, was considered to be possessed because the person would all of a sudden go out of their minds, begin foaming at the mouth and writhe around on the ground. Obviously, it seemed to these people that something sinister was taking control of the person’s body, hence the notion of possession. The same was true of the paranoid schizophrenic, so seemed to be talking to people that weren’t there, or hurting themselves for no apparent reason-they too would have been seen as possessed. Something was taking over the person’s body and mind and they were not able to lead a normal life.

These were frightening, catastrophic forces that were tearing apart their loved ones and causing them to behave in ways that could not be otherwise understood. Sometimes I think that we have become so medical that we sanitize these diagnoses, making them seem like getting the flu and in doing that, we underestimate the struggle and the power that these illnesses have on the human mind and heart. The word demon is a powerful word, maybe we need to reclaim it.

In the land of the Gerasenes, there was a man who had many demons. His behavior was scary and erratic. He would tear off his clothing, bruise himself with rocks, break any chains that they placed on him and run into the wild. He would make his home in the graveyard and scream at anyone who came near. Obviously he was out of his mind, so the villagers understood him to be possessed.

When Jesus sees the man, the demons inside him beg for mercy. They seem like helpless children, unable to put up a fight. They recognize Jesus as the Son of God and beg him not to send them into what they call ‘the abyss’. Jesus decides to send them into some pigs instead. He listens to their request and he finds living bodies for them to inhabit.

Jesus heals this man’s mind. There is no other way to explain the gospel account. He sends the demons into a herd of pigs, and the herd runs down the hill and into the sea. Standing on this high hill many years ago, I saw how steep it was. Anyone, animal or human, who tried to run down that hill would most surely end up in the water. It was that steep.

The owners of the pigs go to the village to process who has happened and no doubt to complain that their pigs have drowned. When the villagers see Jesus and the man who was possessed sitting at his feet, they become afraid. And they ask Jesus to leave. He heals a man and they ask him to leave.

They were afraid of Jesus, afraid of what he might ask of them, afraid of what he might do to them. He was able to turn their world upside down and make a crazy man well. They did not want their world turned upside down. They were afraid of what he might ask of them, what he might do to them. They were afraid because they could not make sense of what they had seen. How could someone have cured the man who had bothered them and frightened them for so many years? They could not fathom what Jesus had done or how he had done it , so they asked him to leave. We are all afraid of Jesus. I am convinced of it. They would have rather lived around a demoniac than encounter the power of God. Life as they knew it was preferable to the change that Jesus would no doubt bring.

Strange isn’t it, to think of being afraid of Jesus? Most of us would deny that we are afraid, but I do think that we are afraid. One of the signs of our fear is our incessant business. Those of us who are comfortable in life, who aren’t battling great illness or hardship, we spend our days consumed with minutia. We are busier than we have ever been before. We claim that we have no time, though we have greater lifespans than any humans ever have had in world history. We have no time for God because we are not sure if we want to allow God inside our hearts too thoroughly. We don’t want God taking over.

We relegate stories like this one to the back-burner. We do not talk about healings very much, or demons, or things that we don’t understand. They are for entertainment, for horror shows and story lines, but not to be discussed seriously. Talking about demons or angels seems so uncool, so old school, like one who has no education or is just a little off.

But quantum physics is telling us that there are many more dimensions than the three that we perceive. Why could there not be forces that we do not see? Who is to say that there are not angels dancing in front of our eyes at this very minute? Do you really know that they are not there?

In the Eucharistic prayer that we say, we articulate the ancient belief that we celebrate the Eucharist with angels and archangels, with all the company of heaven. Think about that for a moment. With all the company of heaven. And if there indeed are such things as angels, (and I don’t mean those fat cupid babies, I mean something majestic and frightening!), then why should there not also be something demonic, something dark to contend with. Something that interferes with our journey to God. When I watch an alcoholic drink himself to death, you cannot tell me that he is not in a spiritual battle with SOMETHING.

I think we write off these things that the Scripture called demons and angels because to admit their existence would be to admit that we are not in control of our world. And we want to be in control. We live in the era of independence and everything in my life is supposed to me within my control: I can make myself healthy, happy, successful, if I just work hard enough. No wonder we don’t like the idea of demons. That would never sell. And I don’t want the kind of God who will interfere in my life.

What I want is some kind of on-call God. I want the kind of Jesus who immediately appears when I need him, when I am in pain or suffering. But when things are going great, I don’t want him asking anything of me. Just leave me be when I am comfortable. Don’t mess with me too much. I don’t want a God who will demand all of me.

That’s why God tends to come to us when we are down, because we really invite him in at that time. Elijah, in the first book of Kings, is fleeing for his life and feeling so bad that he wants to die and only then, when he gives up on living his life as he saw fit, only then does he experience the presence of God in the sound of sheer silence. It is only when he gives up on his own way that he is able to experience God’s way.

So long as you and I remain busy and frantic, God will wait on the sidelines, waiting for us to spin our wheels long enough to realize that we don’t do it so well on our own. And then, hopefully, one day, we will invite Jesus deep into our hearts, to the core of our being, for we want to be possessed by no one other than him.

Every Sunday, we will have moments of silence in worship. This is intentional. I want to stop and just be with you for a moment. I want to listen to the sound of sheer silence and wrap ourselves up in it. I want to wait for God, rather than asking God to catch up with us. I want to be on call for God, rather than asking God to be on-call for me. That silence is scary. That silence is powerful because it is not in our control. And that is why it is so vital to our worship. There could be angels and archangels in that silence. And if we listen, we might hear something eloquent.

The only one who wanted to stay with Jesus in the land of the Gerasenes was the demoniac himself. He knew what it was to let God inside and he wanted nothing more than to be with Jesus always. His battle with darkness had taught him that he needed God, even if that meant giving up the driving seat in his life. He was ready to let God be in control. Are you?

The Oil Spill and Our Emptiness

2010-06-14T10:21:00.003-04:00

At night, I close my eyes and I can see the oil exploding out of the damaged pipeline. It comes to my mind in spare moments, when I am least expecting it. JD has taken to opening up his laptop at night and just staring at that live image. Oil infiltrating water, covering animals, killing the oceans organisms. I cannot look at it for long. I realize that I am praying. I am asking God to make it stop and I am asking God to show us how to live less destructively.

Everybody wants to blame everybody else for the oil spill. It’s BP’s fault for sure, but it’s also the fault of our government or the fault of the consumer who wants oil or the fault of ecoterrorists. It has to be somebody’s fault. The reality is that it is all of our faults. The complexity of the human relationship with the creation is so overwhelming. We have made so many mistakes. We have made so many mistakes.

I am not interested in prescribing whose fault this is, or whether or not we should have offshore drilling or what kind of car you should drive or not drive… What I am interested in is this: How do we begin to think of this environmental disaster from a theological perspective? What does it tell us about God and our relationship with God? And what does it tell us about who we are as human beings?

In the second book of Samuel, David is King of Israel at the height of the golden age. This was the highest moment in the history of Israel. David had united the kingdom and defeated all their enemies. He was a wonderful, powerful king. He was fierce in battle and had the love of the people behind him. Everything was good in his life. Everything. But he was not satisfied. He wanted more.

We see this phenomenon with our celebrities. They have more money than most of us can imagine, they have beauty, they are adored. But they want more. Often they buy things in great excess, or take drugs, looking for something more to fill them. Suicide rates skyrocket, strangely among those who seem to have everything.

David had everything. Then one night, he saw something that he couldn’t have. He was walking along his rooftop to get away from the heat. The king’s rooftop was above all others, it was a sign of his prestige and rank. So David could look out and see all the rooftops below him. And there, on one of the rooftops, was a woman. It was her time of the month so she was bathing, naked. And he wanted her.

David had more wives than the Bible cares to count. He could have had any of them, but instead he wanted the wife of Uriah the Hittite. And so he took her, even though she was married. He knew that this was wrong, but he wanted to satiate his desire. He wanted her more than he cared about what was right.

When Bathsheeba gets pregnant, David invites her husband back from war hoping that he will sleep with her. But Uriah is a virtuous man, a man with discipline, and he follows the custom that teaches that a man should not sleep with his wife when his men are in battle. So David has Uriah sent back to the war, to the front of the line, and there Uriah is killed.

Desire becomes Adultery. Adultery becomes murder.

And then the sin begins to spread. Sin is viral, you know. If it is not acknowledged and treated, it affects generations-generations feels the effects of failed relationships, of anger, jealousy, cruelty. David’s children end up fighting. One of them is raped by her half-brother, another is murdered. David’s life goes from glory to a chaotic bad soap opera and all because he could not keep his hands to himself. All because he took what did not belong to him.

When the prophet comes to David and tells a story of a little ewe lamb that is taken by the man who has so many lambs, David is incensed. Then the prophet reveals that it is David himself who is the man. And David suffers from that day forward.

Why do we suffer? We human beings suffer because we do not know how to curb our desire. We want more than we need. We take what we do not need. And our world suffers. Our planet suffers.

If every human being gave away ten percent of his or her income to the poor, the world would be altered forever. Hunger would be alleviated. It would be over.

But we cannot stop taking and wanting and wanting and taking. It all reaches back to that moment in Eden when Eve took something that God had forbidden her to take. Things have always been out of balance since that original fall.

We did not fall by having sex or drinking, but by taking.

So what do we do with our condition, the condition of wanting more than we need?

We begin by knowing that God loves us and has filled our need. God gave us the ultimate gift in Jesus, a gift that, once we fully understand it, should fill every need.

You no longer need anything. You have everything that you need. Everything.

The Pharisees did not know that, but the poor woman did. She knew that Jesus gave her everything, even though her whole life had been a mess. She knew that he alone could bring her joy.

So she poured oil over his feet. It ran down his ankles, between his toes, on the floor, and its smell filled the room. She wiped his feet with her hair, making it oily and messy. She looked like a fool for him. And she did not care.

God doesn’t ask you for anything. Not for anything. God just gives and gives. Even as oil pours out of the burst pipeline, God gives. We really don’t need to give anything in return, but when we get the gift, we want to give another kind of oil. We want to pour out our hearts to him and give him everything.

Strange isn’t it? We have already been filled to overflowing by God’s generosity in Jesus. And yet, out of habit and ignorance, we continue to act as if we need to be filled. But God has already given us everything. EVERYTHING.

The Word of God Online?

2010-06-14T10:16:00.000-04:00

The tomb of Helen Keller can be found on the grounds of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Helen Keller, the famous scholar and writer, became deaf and blind after a terrible illness in early childhood. As a result, she grew up savage-like in a home full of people who did not understand her. In the play, the Miracle Worker, Helen is saved by a young woman who comes to teach her. After months of battles, the young woman, Annie, has taught Helen how to have manners, how to eat properly, how to behave. But Helen remains alone in darkness. Over and over again, Annie will spell into Helen’s hands. Helen mimics the spelling and receives rewards, but never is she able to connect the letter with the meaning of a word, the actual connection between the word and the thing itself eludes her.

One day, Helen has felt her way to the water pump in the yard. As Helen pumps the water and lets it run cool over her hands, Annie spells the word W-A-T-E-R. Water. Again, Annie spells water into Helen’s palm as the cool liquid runs over her hand and out between her fingers.

Helen stops pumping. She would later write that in that moment, she awoke to life. All had been darkness before that moment. Before that moment, she was completely and totally alone in a world with no meaning, nothing but chaos was before her. But in that one moment, Helen recalled the one word that she had learned when she was just a toddler, right before she became ill. The word, as she had pronounced it, was WAWA.

WAWA, Water-Helen realized that the Word was a way of connecting to the liquid that had poured over her hand. Life and light entered her mind and her world, literally, began that day. She was born to the Word and the Word was born in her.

In the beginning was the Word…what came into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people. The Gospel of John

God is the Word. God is the Connection. God is the AHA moment.

God is present in the office of a therapist who has counseled and listened to the same man for years. Yet on this particular day, the therapist and gently repeats an insight that he has had and is able to communicate to the man a pattern in his behavior so that the man can see, for the first time in his life, that he is wounded, that he is good and that he is loved.

God is present when someone plays the most beautiful music, music that lifts the soul to levels that it has never experienced and a young woman sits in the concert hall and weeps and she cannot even explain why.

God is present when a mathmetician cannot solve a problem and he goes to bed in chaos and confusion. Then, just before the dawn, he awakens and the solution is clearly before him, like a gift from God. It is so simple and so clear. Why did he not see it before?

In the beginning was the Connection…

In the beginning was the Aha moment…

In the beginning was the…CLICK?

That is the question of our day, isn’t it? Is God present in the click? Can God be present online? Can the Word of God, the Logos, the meaning that gives life to all things, can it be conveyed in cyberspace?

I do not think that it is our job to answer this question. Rather, it is our job to send out the word, and see if it takes.

Annie did not know if the Logos would ever reach Helen Keller through the signs that she was making over and over and over again into the small hand of that child. Over and over again, Hellen Keller would receive spelled letters in her hand and it was nothing but an exercise, a game. Over and over again Annie spelled the letters that represented new objects and better objects. Helen would repeat them back but they meant nothing to her. There was no connection between the spelling of a word and the meaning or representation of the thing itself.

Annie would not give up because she knew that finding a way to connect with Helen meant the difference between light and darkness to that little girl. It was the difference between life and death.

Do I know how people will encounter God online? I have no idea! But as leaders in the Church, it is our call and our duty to keep spelling the Word into peoples hands in every way that we know how. And we must try to spell out the Word in every medium known to us, including cyberspace. If there is even a remote chance that God will reach out an touch the heart of a lost soul over the computer screen, then we must get to work!

Annie did not know that Hellen would hear her on that thousanth time that she sent out the same message of meaning to that little wild girl. She had no idea that on that day, it would be that word that would be heard. She spread seeds of the word every day, and waited for something to take root in Helen’s heart.

God continues to call us with the ancient words of Jesus. They speak to us over thousands of years… Go forth and preach the gospel – Go and tell folks that I love them. God calls to us to bring light and life to the world. We are to continue to spread the gospel, to spell out those words of God and this incredible man called Jesus over and over again. We are called to spell under water, in the air, online, in the movies, on skype and facebook and twitter and flikr.

Logos Online

2010-06-14T09:59:00.000-04:00